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On tee Wing. 



RAMBLING NOTES 



TEIP TO THE PACIFIC, 



MARY E. BLAKE, 

[m. e. u.] 
Author of ''Poems,'' '' r^ambling Talks," etc., etc. 




BOSTON: 
LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 

1883. 



/■ 



Copyright, 

1883, 

By Mary E. Blake. 



PRINTED BY 

JAMES S. ADAMS, 
Boston, Mass. 



INTRODUCTION. 



A DEM AND from many quarters, — which a 
servant of the public has no right to disre- 
gard, — and the interest evinced by a wide 
circle of readers, when the letters which make up 
the larger part of these pages appeared last year 
in the Boston journal, have induced me to offer 
them again, revised and enlarged, in this more 
permanent form. Partly because I think no book 
should ever be published which requires apology 
for its contents, and partly because the title of 
the little volume sufficiently explains its want 
of elaboration, I shall make no excuse for the 
casual nature of the following: chanters. For 
what could be expected of one on the wing, but 

bird's-eve views '^. 

M. E. B. 
Boston, January, 1883. 



C O N T E N T S . 



Clini^ter. Page. 

I. A First Flight; from Boston to Chicago . r 

II. The Beginning of the Great Vv'est . . .11 

III. On the Way through Colorado .... 23 

IV. The Garden of the Gods 33 

V. In the Grand Canons 43 

VI. The Border Lands of Ro.mance . . . .61 

VII. The City of the Angels 81 

VIII. A California Stage-Ride 99 

IX. The Valley of the Great Grizzly Bear . . m 

X. A Climb through the Clouds 121 

XI. Within the Golden Gate ..... 135 

Xil. Some of the Witcheries of California. . . 145 

XIII. Eccentricities of California .... 159 

XIV. A.MONG the Mines .... .... i6g 

XV. In the City of Zion 1S5 

XVI. Homeward- Bound Across the Continent . . igg 

XVII. A Glimpse of Niagara 209 

XVIII. Pros and Cons on the Subject of Excursions . 221 



ON THE WING. 



CHAPTER I. 

A FIRST FLIGHT — FROM BOSTON TO CHICAGO. 

THE first night in a Wagner "sleeper," oi route 
for California, is apt to be one of the expe- 
riences of life. You have not yet got your 
sea-legs on, so to speak ; you have n't fully mastered 
the seaman-like roll which is to carry you safely 
over the heaving deck of the palace car ; the manage- 
ment of your equilibrium bothers, and you are just 
sufficiently dazed and tired to be a little miserable 
whether or no. When the time comes to enter your 
bunk, even if it has a double berth, you lose heart 
still more. It looks so straight, and the curtains so 
heavy, you bump your poor head getting in and your 
poor back getting out ; you are tingling yet with a sort 
of sub-acute excitement at the danger and darinir of 
your rash act in going west on a flying trip through 
the dark, and the spasms of home-sickness, which 
have been coming and going at intervals all day, begin 
to settle into a sober ache of long-ing. In this strait, 
such minor shocks to your sensitiveness as a glimpse 
now and again of a gentlemanly young fellow in his 
shirt-sleeves, or a lady-like young person in her corset 
cover, become rather exhilarating than otherwise, as 
proclaiming your release from conventionalities, and as 
rubbing off that dust of conservatism which naturallv 



2 ON THE WING. 

clings about any bit of New England society. You 
peep out occasionally to see how the rest are getting 
on, until nothing is left but the empty, narrow aisle 
in the middle, and then at last compose your own 
decorous nightcap to sleep. But a sense of responsi- 
bility remains with you. Every time through the long 
night that the car gives a lurch, you sit up to ponder 
its meaning ; every time the whistle sounds you draw 
your curtain to know what it means. A vague im- 
pression that the engineer needs watching and guid- 
ance rests with you, and weights even your short 
dreams with personal care. You are not a bit nervous 
— just as cool as the very hot atmosphere of the car 
will allow one to be — but you prefer getting up every 
half-hour to see that things are properly attended to. 
Farther up, an easy old traveller sleeps soundly and 
loudly; could habit ever makejK^?^ so selfish ? 

Your sleepless disinterestedness pays in the end; 
you get so much more for your money. Why, here 
last night, in different glimpses, were first an illumi- 
nated city — its flaring lights streaming high into the 
misty air like an Aurora; then a gaunt row of spectral 
poplars standing like soldierly ghosts in the white 
moonlight ; now a thunderous passage of some flash- 
ing meteoric train, and again the shadow of a quiet 
town asleep on a hillside ; once we tore through a 
tunnel with dismal and awful shriek into the colored 
signals and electric brilliancy of a great crossing ; and 
once, just as the sky began to change to the faint 
opalescence of dawn, there was Cassiopeia, low down 
in the north, with each of her five stars aflame like a 



ON THE WING. ^ 

burning torch, looking in at us in a wholly royal man- 
ner. And all this thrown in like a side-show at a 
circus while you are taking flying leaps through the 
darkness at the rate of forty miles an hour ! A sym- 
pathising friend wlio heard all this next morning, con- 
soled me by the prediction that I would sleep like a 
top to-morrow. But poople who desire to sleep like 
tops should always stay to hum — that is not what we 
paid our money and came West for. 

" How did I get in a Wagner sleeping car? " Well, 
that's neither here nor there. If a busy home-body 
chooses to pack her trunk one day and go on a Ray- 
mond excursion the next, whose business is it.^ Isn't 
it the only way for a busy home-body to go ? If she 
stops to consider all the pros and co?is, — the baby's 
new tooth, the spring house-cleaning, the chances of 
coughs and colds, the children's changes for summer, 
the general depravity of inanimate things, in fact, 
which works such infernal revolutions in a household 
when its natural head is absent, — if she waits to think 
of these, — the stay-at-home weight will be so over- 
whelming in proportion that she could not be pro- 
pelled away by anything short of a catapult. She 
w^ho hesitates is lost. The only part for a valiant 
W'Oman is to buy her ticket, close her eyes, and at one 
fell swoop leave all behind her. It was the plunge of 
Curtius which saved Rome. 

We started on a gray day, teary and dreary like our 
feelings, but wath occasional bright gleams and fair 
promise of a joyous to-morrow. A railroad car is 
never particularly cheery, and is too business-like to 



4 ON THE WING. 

be picturesque ; but by the time you get your wraps 
disposed in graceful negligence, your extra bundles 
put away, and the flowers which loving hands have 
brought to breathe their sweet message of fragrant 
remembrance disposed to the best advantage, your 
particular section manages to put on a home look. 
You find, too, that of all other places it is the best for 
fraternizing. Strangers in the morning are acquaint- 
ances at night and friends by breakfast time. 

There is nothing like travel for giving a person 
broad views of men and things, and crushing in the 
bud puerile enthusiasms. For what other reason can 
the man who goes to Europe for two months sit calmly 
down on his neighbors for the term of his natural life ? 
For what other reason could we, who ordinarily would 
rave so loudly and long over the Berkshire Hills, look 
at them now with the supercilious, well-bred indiffer- 
ence of people on their way to Pike's Peak and the 
Rocky Mountains ? A woman who has a proper regard 
for her nervous centres cannot afford to begin to gush 
a hundred miles from the start, when she has nine 
thousand miles of a journey still before her. The 
climax would be too terrific. So we crossed the State 
line into New Vork in heroic silence. 

But when we began next morning to pass through 
the beautiful meadows of Pennsylvania and Ohio, 
when the lagging sun came out at noon and found us 
still passing fields as level and green as the baize of a 
billiard table, when night fell while we were seemingly 
in the midst of that beautiful, fertile, stoneless reach, 
■we began to talk in spite of ourselves. Fresh from 



ON THE WING. 5 

the rock-ribbed soil of New England, where only by- 
mistake a little earth is occasionally found sifted over 
the granite foundation, these smooth, flawless stretches 
of country are beyond any conception we can form of 
them. Even the rich brown soil, covered now with 
the faint green of freshly-springing wheat and grain, 
was not so novel to our eyes as this wonderful free- 
dom from any vestige of stoniness. The brakeman 
who heard us commenting so delightedly over this 
was evidently nonplussed. " I shed be more s'prised 
ef et 1UUZ rocky," said he; "in these parts ef a man 
scoops in a stun that weighs fifty pounds he -hauls it 
hum an sets it up in his front }ard for folks to look 
at." Towards noon we passed the tragic bridge of 
Ashtabula, looking calm and innocent enough, span- 
ning the shallow, brawling stream that danced in the 
sunshine below it, A little later on, the red roofs of 
the pleasant farm-house, which its dying master so 
longed to see, showed themselves beyond the little 
station at Mentor. There was a group of peach trees 
in full bloom, shining like a pink flush between the 
tender green of budding apple trees ; the happy fields 
were smiling at the waking touch of growth, but our 
hearts went out more in accordance with the sorrow- 
ing woman who sat by her solitary fireside, than with 
the living springtime. 

As we enter Cleveland I find a disappointment in 
store. In common with most sensible people, certain 
words have always had a strange power of exciting 
me to romance and conjecture. Vinelands and vine- 
yards belonged to this catalogue ; so when they told 



6 ON THE WING. 

US we would reach the grape country soon, visions of 
sunny, sloping hillsides, with shadows filtering through 
broad leaves and graceful tendrils climbing over rustic 
arches were in my mind. It was no use for common 
sense to say it was not yet summer; common sense 
is the slave of imagination, and as such ordered about 
without mercy. Imagine then the shock, of acre after 
acre of short stakes, thick and clumsy, as if some 
enterprising Natick boot manufacturer had planted 
shoe-pegs for seed and they had grown up, for that 
was all we saw of the vineyards. The vines were not 
yet out of bed ; but the city itself is a pleasant one, 
and shows its kindly side to strangers in the beautiful 
park which skirts the railroad. 

Lake Erie was in one of her surly moods after a 
long storm, which had riled her naturally placid com- 
plexion into muddiness. There was none of the lovely 
blue of my beloved old ocean, and even the passing 
sails of far-away ships could not make it have the 
proper effect. We began after dinner to come across 
little log cabins here and there, and girls and women 
dowered with that enormous sunbonnet which seems 
to be a birthright of the Southern and Western pretty 
maid. Two rosy-cheeked poppets on the platform of 
a country station we passed, flirting with an awkward 
young Iloosier, showed that this sort of inelegant head- 
gear can be made as eloquent as a Gainsborough hat, 
when the head it covers is young and beautiful. 

Still the same level, smiling fields, the rushing train 
flying in a straight arrow line through them. There 
3s very little unpleasant motion. Some drowsy ones 



ON THE WING. 7 

are dreaming away on imi^rovised pillows ; some are 
reading; some visiting neighbors; — it seems as if we 
were already so used to the novelty that we have been 
here a month instead of a day. At Toledo a sonorous 
gong, which I suppose is the sort of guitar the Toledo 
blades use in serenading, woos us to supper. The 
small boy who bangs it evidently means to earn his 
money. We find the usual unusually good meal wait- 
ing. On this point the excursionists have made a ten- 
strike ; they live on the fat of whatever land in which 
they happen to tarry. 

It seemed, at first, as if a different atmosphere 
should mark our passage across each state line, — 
some change of feeling or temperature to mark our 
progression between the somewhat finical straight- 
ness of Eastern limitations, and the broad unfinished 
mental processes of the West. But though we have 
tumbled over six boundaries already, I would never 
have known we had left New England, except for the 
level country and the queer, slovenly, zigzag fences. 
And yet the simple consciousness of distance shadows 
our jubilant spirits as the second day begins to darken, 
and the thought of home leaves us, like Huldy, — 

"All kind o' smily round the lips 
An' teary round the lashes." 

The porter of our sleeping-car must have moral 
designs in keeping us so hot. He either wants to 
frighten us into a belief in eternal punishment, or to 
frighten us out of it. At five o'clock this morning, when 
we awoke in the Chicago depot, it would have done 



8 ON THE WING. 

lor a page of Dante's Inferno. I finished my toilet in 
the open outer air, rather than smother within. But 
we gave the young African his tip all the same, for 
he did it out of kindness. 

After one day of walking and riding around Chicago, 
our impressions are like a kaleidoscope. So fiat a 
place was never before known; it seems as if a spirit- 
level had been taken, and even the usual slight curve 
of the earth's surface smoothed off. Then they set 
out Chicago. But they have large hearts and noble 
ideas, these Western people. The stately, broad 
avenues go in such magnificently broad lines, straight 
as an arrow's flight, from lake to prairie. The beauti- 
ful mansions, each set in its square of green lawn, 
give a beauty and oddity to the richer part that the 
business portion does not carry out. Looking from 
the Sherman House, one might really be looking up 
State street, except for the extra dinginess which the 
soft coal adds to the great buildings. You can almost 
feel\\\^ smutchiness. Looking down across the busi- 
ness portions, the heavy smoke clouds hang like a pall 
low down even into the streets. I am afraid it would 
spoil a good deal of the pleasure of life here for me. 
We have seen wonders and wonders, but who wants 
to be bored with details of sight-seeing when they can 
come some other time and see for themselves — when 
they can roll magnificently through the gas-lit bowels 
of the earth with ships sailing above their heads, 
or stand in awe and admiration before those four 
gigantic engines at the water-works of which one 
alone pumps 36,000,000 gallons a day, or see the enor- 



ON THE WING. 9 

mous stock-yards, or investigate the still more enor- 
mous grain-elevators. The place is meant for a race 
of giants — and they are giants in energy and large- 
heartedness. This is why when one of them grasps 
your hand with that firm, Western clasp, you feel 
no longer a stranger in a strange city, but a friend 
made at home by loving kindness, with a strong 
support behind you which will back you for all it is 
worth. 

We are still in the same world as at home, however. 
The troops of pretty girls you left in Washington 
street are here walking up Clark street with the same 
fluffy hair, big hats, and long satin overcoats. Spring 
dresses are not out yet, though we were passing 
dandelions and buttercups on the fields for hours 
yesterday. Men and women may have a shade of 
better color in their faces, but otherwise there is no 
change. They talk of " blocks " in describing distances 
just as they do in New York, and advertise houses 
"for rent '' instead of to let. They speak with a little 
more breadth in their vowels and honest attention to 
consonants, wisely thinking that if they were not in- 
tended for use the words would have been spelled 
without them ; otherwise they are bone of our bone 
and flesh of our flesh. 

The streets on Saturday night are simply swarming. 
I think nobody can be left at home, and the wooden 
pavements are in the most awful condition, once you 
get out of the really busy portion. A ship in a storm 
is nothing to the tossing our barouche and poor 
bones got yesterday. It is another of the evils of the 



lO ON THE WING. 

republics that such persons as whoever the man may 
be who took the contract for this work and made such 
a wretched bungle of it cannot be instantly beheaded^ 
as a salutary warning to his kind. Two or three sum- 
mary executions would save enough profanity to work 
a larger revival than Moody and Sankey's. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WEST. 

THE more one sees of Chicago, the more the 
difference between it and an Eastern city- 
impresses itself. To walk the streets on 
Sunday and see furniture wagons moving loads of 
goods, the doors of hundreds of shops open, while 
buying and selling went on, and crowds bent on 
evidently temporal business, mingling with decorous 
church-goers, was strange enough. But to travel 
at night, under the glare of gas and electric lights, to 
see theatre doors swarming with pleasure seekers, 
brilliantly illuminated stores, immense number of Ger- 
mans with their deep-mouthed gutturals, and the open 
halls and pleasure gardens, made stronger inroad still 
on the hereditary prejudices of descendants of the 
Pilgrims. If another conflagration had swept the 
place, like Sodom, from the face of the earth, it would 
have been to many minds among us only the just 
reward of its iniquities. Yet what right have we to 
raise our own standard of morals and make every one 
else doff his hat in passing? The foundations of 
religious belief ought to lie too deep for such passing 
winds to shake; and it would take much stronger 
proof to convince me that there are not as many saints 
in Chicago as in Boston. 



12 ON THE WING. 

We found a mild flavor of the great fire still in the 
air; it will take a new generation to heal the scar. 
Events reckon from before or after, relics linger in 
private and public places, and the harrowing memories 
of ruin and desolation still rankle in many hearts. But 
this is sjib rosa ; outwardly, the brave, lusty city might 
be a hundred years old for any trace of ruin or imma- 
turity about it. The same magnificence of resource 
which shows itself in its 350 acres of stock-yards, in 
its forest of elevators, in its miles of new avenues, in 
the stupendous rush of its business streets, is behind 
everything. It opens the hands and hearts of its 
people to a hospitality as broad as its dimensions; it 
puts a fine, impulsive swing into their everyday gait ; 
it makes a background of reality for the fabulous 
stories of wealth and enterprise which are in the air. 
You can fully believe that any Chicagoan, as well as 
the man pointed out, might have found himself, on re- 
tiring from business, with a million and a half more than 
he counted on, or that any other might have answered 
a friendly sympathizer, with the lordly indifference of 

Mr. , who indorsed a note for two millions and 

had to pay it : "0,1 never look back at that sort of 
thing ! " You can fully believe anything of a place 
where porter-house steak costs only sixteen cents a 
pound ; where strawberries come in March and go in 
November; where the horse cars run without horses; 
where the people have an amount of spiritual elasticity 
which enables them to go to church Sunday morning 
and to opera Sunday night without destroying their 
usual poise, and where the world is so flat that it seems 



ON THE WING. 1 3 

as if Dame Nature had mistaken the crust of the earth 
for pastry and rolled it with a rolling-pin. 

Remembering the markets of Philadelphia and 
Washington, we were somewhat disappointed in those 
of Chica<:;o. There was nothing distinctive about 
them, as '':ompared with the luscious piles of fruits 
and flowe rs, the sweet-smelling heaps of freshly- 
grated co( oanut, the tempting pats of butter hidden 
under gre^-n leaves, and the shining white eyes and 
black facer, of the turbaned huxters in the spacious 
southern q larters. Before you begin to question, you 
might be ^mong any collection of provision dealers, 
ruddy-cherked and white-aproned, of your native city, 
but as sorn as you hear the price list, you know that 
this is nnother world. One does n't wonder that 
prudent ""iiousekeepers here hesitate about coming to 
Bostcr to live. 

We need to come West to understand the luxury 
of r^odern travel. The spirit of enterprise is so ram- 
p?nt here — the population are so constantly moving, 
prospecting, investigating, colonizing, that they lavish 
time and skill in eliminating every drawback from 
the comfort of railway life. As a natural consequence 
their cars are the best in the world. The Pullman is 
brighter, roomier, and more convenient than the Wag- 
tier. The sections are larger; the mattress and pillows 
wider and softer; the toilet arrangements more plenti- 
ful. Add to this that you have acquired a certain 
savoir faire — you know what you want and how to 
get it; you have learned to go from one end to 
the other of the train while at full speed without too 



14 ON THE WING. 

many false steps. You begin to have a certain home 
feehng in the tidy compartment, which is your es- 
pecial property, with its mirror between the two broad 
windows, its portable table and its silver hooks. The 
brightest of mulatto boys waits your beck to bring 
a clean, white pillow for your tired head, to brush 
your dusty clothes, to fetch messages, to gather up 
any incidental rubbish of orange-peel or peanut shell or 
paper scrap. You can write if the mood takes you, or 
play games, or read your neighbor's books ; if you 
want anything under the sun, from a cambric needle 
to a French bonbon, from a postage stamp to an en- 
cyclopaedia, there are a score of valises besides your 
own to choose from. There are books, magazines, 
newspapers, maps, guide-books, and time-tables in be- 
wildering array to consult ; there are country depots to 
raid upon, and country people to startle, at queer far- 
away places ; there are Mayflowers to gather and 
strange beetles to impale at prairie watering stations ; 
and there are the observations to make that belong to 
this new order of things. Each car in the long train 
has its own special recommendation ; one has the 
prettiest young girl, one the brightest company, one 
the most elaborate finish, and so on. We modestly 
plume ourselves on the most picturesque young man 
w^ith the most artistic leaning toward the fine arts, and 
the nattiest and laziest little porter of the party, 
*' which namin' no names, no offence can be took." 

Owing to these and a thousand other causes, the 
third and fourth days of railroad travel are less weary 
than the first. There is always something unexpected 



ON thp: wing. 



15 



to keep one awake and interested ; a long tract of over- 
flowed country, with pale green cottonwoods growing 
out of tlie w'ater in a ravishing bit of aesthetic color- 
ing, a forest of delicately-tinted trees, a bank of bril- 
liant purple flowers extending for miles along the 
track, or the long majestic sweep of some great river, 
turbid and furious, with a flight of wild duck winging 
their slow way northward. On the Mississippi we 
passed a great steamboat — the steamboat of Kit, and 
the Octoroon, and Uncle Tom's Cabin — top-heavy to 
our sea-used eyes, with a raft of acres of logs float- 
ing after it from the upper country. At Joliet we came 
upon a crop of rocks for the first time after hundreds 
of miles of smooth prairie ; and quarries of stone of 
the strangest formation, as if the strata were laid in 
masonry. Farther on was a region of coal mines ; at 
the mouth of one a miner had just emerged from 
underground. He was a sohtary and most desolate 
figure ; his flannel shirt open from throat to waist, his 
heavy eyes lustreless, his face and bare arms as black 
as the coal-bed from which he had just risen. As the 
train slowly drew up at the tank near by, he stood 
motionless, his tired arms crossed over his patient 
breast, seemingly beyond being moved to anything 
else than weary endurance. It gave me a pang to see 
his pathetic figure merge again into the flat landscape. 
What right had one part of the world to be butterflies 
and the rest grubs ? 

But to return to our Pullmans. There was a deli- 
cious siesta at early morning when one first woke. 
The uncertainty which made the night jerkily anxious 



l6 ON THE WING. 

Avas over ; you no longer felt obliged to know what 
every twist or jar meant; your faith in human nature 
and the employes of the railroad returned, and there 
were two good hours during which, luxuriantly in- 
dolent, you could doze and dream, or lazily watch the 
panoramic world whizzing by your window. The 
soothing motion, the novelty, the comfort were inde- 
scribable ; you could meditate, admire, enjoy by turns. 
Your horizon was absolutely free from care. When 
it pleased you to get up, you knew that there was 
a deft man-of-all-work to change your bed-chamber 
into a drawing-room ; your breakfast would be ready 
at some clean country station, ordered beforehand 
by your advance courier ; every petty hindrance of 
looking after or caring for baggage or checks would 
be lifted from your shoulders, and there was no draw- 
back to the blissful ease of perfect freedom. It 
would be ruinous if this lasted too long; so you 
rather welcome the sudden jerk that bumps your head 
against the marble basin while performing your ablu- 
tions, and then tumbles you into an opposite corner — 
you feel that it makes you square with fate. To be 
too happy might anger the gods. 

It was lying this way one morning, looking, as I 
thought, toward the west, for the sun had set on that 
side the evening before, that I saw a glorious sight. 
Little by little, up through the night, came a tint of 
loveliest amber climbing above the horizon. Little 
by little it changed, deepening into mellow orange, 
and creeping high and higher, while flushes of rose- 
color ran through it, until at last the entire sky was 



ON THE WING. T/ 

oneburnino; glorv of crimson. While I lay breathless, 
looking in wonder at such a blaze of reflected light, 
the great round sun lifted itself above the world, and 
I realized only then that our direction had changed 
during the darkness, so that I had really seen day 
dawn over the plains of Kansas. 

It was about this time we were introduced to the 
altogether delightful idea of the dining-car. Clean, 
bright, and airy, with snowy linen — the whitest we 
had seen since leaving home — with tiny sideboards, 
set above the tables, gay with glasses and a bit or 
two of Kiota, with a cuisine that would tempt a 
gourmet, what a nice bit of variety show^ it made for 
us. From the speck of a kitchen at one end, about 
three feet by six, surrounded by ovens, steamiers 
and stew-pans, came a bill of fare with everything 
from green-turtle soup to canvas-back duck, English 
snipe, and olives. The cook was a cordon bleu, a real 
chef in his honorable profession. How he created 
the forty-seven dishes on his bill of fare from such a 
mite of a laboratory would puzzle any one but such a 
black conjurer as himself. I would n't mind putting 
a girdle round the earth at any time with such a com- 
missariat in front of me. 

Kansas City is an absurd jumble of ups and downs. 
We thought at first the inhabitants must be aeron- 
auts, who went , in balloons to reach their dwelling 
houses, but on nearer inspection we found goat-paths 
leading up the edges of the precipices, and graded 
roads reaching around them by wide curves. Look- 
ing at it from the standpoint of babies, it would be a 



l8 ON THE WING. 

dreadful town to live in. A single misstep would roll 
any well regulated child from fifty to three hundred 
feet, according to locality. I wonder all the grown-up 
people are not cripples. The business town is on the 
flats by the river. It is a place of great activity. 
Thirteen railroad lines begin or terminate in it, and 
the result is stupendous. That train on your right 
will take you to Mexico; this on your left to Boston; 
just across there is one placarded " For Colorado, 
Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, Oregon and Cali- 
fornia," which is a sort of multum in parvo only pos- 
sible in a western station. 

Kansas itself is a delightful country. All day we 
rode between luxuriant fields of winter wheat or 
springing corn, interspersed with huge stock-raising 
farms, each divided by hedges of osage-orange in the 
full green strength of early summer. We saw, too, 
substantial walls of stone — a pretty, cream-colored 
stone, that makes a charming contrast with the vegeta- 
tion — and neat. New England rail fences. The 
slovenly Virginia fence, which is neither strong nor 
lovely, seems to be discarded. In these immense 
fields, all kinds of mechanical implements, moved by 
horse-power, enable one man to do the w^ork of a 
dozen. Such is the luxuriant richness of the loam 
that it is absolutely black and seems of inexhaustible 
fertility. It could be a granary for the world. In the 
towns one is constantly surprised by the beauty of the 
public buildings, the finest of which is usually the 
school-house. Miles and miles away from any vestige 
of civilization, bevond this alv/avs beautiful culti\'a- 



ON THE WING. I9 

tion, you come upon a commodious two-story farm- 
house, with a colony of smaller habitations clustered 
near. Across the prairie roads you seldom see a 
single horse driven, except for riding ; usually a pair 
of fine animals are harnessed to even the smallest 
vehicle. Here and there, by the bank of a river, or on 
some overhanging cliff, the strange geological foun- 
dation of the country shows itself; a geometrically 
regular layer of cream-colored stone, two or three feet 
in depth, set in a deep bed of clay which the touch of 
time has dried into a resemblance of sandstone. In 
the distance now and again a beautiful rolling country 
fills the horizon, or a fine forest of straight young trees 
comes down to the foreground. Sometimes for miles 
we follow the course of the river, but ever and always 
the great marv^el to us is the richness of the soil. It 
is a country of which one might truly say, " Tickle 
it with a hoe and it laughs into a harvest," I can 
see the old New England farmer who sits opposite 
growing gray hour by hour as he looks upon this para- 
dise of produce lands, and thinks of the rocky hill- 
sides at home. 

We rode on the engine for an hour one day, thanks 
to the kind offices of a friend. Perched snugly on the 
fireman's seat, the supple, sturdy monster, scarcely 
trembling, except as now and then a fiery breath quiv- 
ered through his throttle valves, the dust and cinders 
which had been the bane of our lives in the cars 
behind, floating entirely out of our atmosphere, we 
dashed serenely through thirty miles of space as easily 
as if we were passing the sixty minutes in a home 



20 ON THE WING. 

rocking-chair. (By the way, the happy man who ever 
finds a Yankee notion for consuming the dust and 
ashes on railway trains will enter into his reward even 
in the flesh; blessing, fame and money — I put the 
rewards in their proper order of progression — await 
him). The wild western dash of speed, the unholy 
noise of steam and motion, and the fragile look of the 
narrow white track flying before us across the world, 
would have alarmed my usually quiet nerves, if I did 
not understand my surroundings. The engine was 
built at Hinckley & WiUiams's on Harrison avenue ; 
the engineer and his assistant were born, one in 
Somerville and the other in Lawrence; my companion 
was a slim young Bostonian, who could lead a German 
or give you the Ottello Fantasie of Ernst one night 
and climb Mont Blanc next morning, so I felt per- 
fectly at home. Such a New England crowd would 
never go back on me. The gallant fireman, when not 
engaged in shoveling coal, explained the country 
through which we were passing. "Wouldn't think, 
would you, that that wheat 'u'd be tall enough to hide 
a man on horseback next August.'"' he said. "Its 
the truth ; I boxed some up 'n' sent it home last year, 
for I'm a eastern man myself. My father stands six 
foot two in his stockin's, an' 'twas taller 'n him. 
But ef they kin beat us on corn we 've got the 
bulge on them in brains. They got to fall back on 
us yit." 

Indeed, so far we have not been brought in contact 
with any really Western people. They all seem to 
have drifted here from other places. But they begin 



ON THE WING. 2 1 

to have mail-boxes at the stations labeled for "the 
East," so that we feel we are at least drawing nearer 
the star of empire. 

Meantime, we have made up our minds that it is non- 
sense to talk of the " tiresomeness " of railway travel. 
Think of the tribulations of our grandmothers in going 
from New York to Boston ! Think of their rough 
roads and their jolting, draughty carriages, their cold 
comfort and weary days ; then compare it with the 
indolent, well-warmed, well-lighted entourage of this 
royal progress, and imagine yourself a martyr — if 
you dare ! 



CHAPTER III. 

ON THE WAY THROUGH COLORADO. 

IT is in Missouri that we first come upon Summer 
and the mule. This much abused but indispen- 
sable animal is a feature henceforth in every land- 
scape. Old negroes drive or lead them along stump- 
lined roads ; fat piccaninies shy stones at their patient 
noses from the door-yards of lowly wayside cabins; 
gay youths, flannel -shirted and wide -belted, snap 
long whips as they guide teams drawn by four or six 
animals over the broad prairies. This and the strange 
hieroglyphics on the lines of freight-cars wc pass, 
would tell us we were far from home even without the 
aid of any other moral eccentricity. We arc pointed 
out such landmarks as where the cow-boys raided 
upon and robbed a train, where Jesse James lies 
buried in state in his mother's door-yard, or where the 
spring floods tore their path of desolation through a 
country side. At one place we passed two young 
Indians holding a plough, drawn by four horses, at the 
end of a furrow a full mile long across one unbroken 
field, set like a picture of Millet against a sunset sky. 
The great, bare, desert-like plain of Colorado in the 
parts through which we pass, forms the dreariest con- 
trast to the green beauty of Kansas. There is scarcely 
any relief to the desolate outlook. The small settle- 
ments are of the most primitive description. The soil 



24 ON THE WING. 

looks baked and caked even in this early spring-time. 
A few far-apart clumps of immature, spiritless trees 
dot the landscape ; an occasional small stream shows 
the prints of countless cattle-hoofs on its muddy banks, 
and long reaches of sage-brush and cactus intersperse 
the gray country. For heaven's sake, beware of the 
cactus ! In the gush and enthusiasm of first acquain- 
tance, and as being the only really original thing you 
have met since leaving home, you will l)e tempted at 
first to interview it. Take the elder Weller's advice in 
regard to widows — "don't." It looks harmless and 
inoffensive enough; it does not flaunt its thorny ban- 
ner in your faces ; it clings lowly and modestly to the 
soil and seems to shun observation. But that is all a 
dodge to rouse your curiosity. It is, like Bunthome, 
an accursed thing. The most subtly fine cambric 
needle is not so delicate as its thread-like spikes; 
the most highly tempered steel crowbar is not so 
strong. Age cannot wither nor custom stale its in- 
finite prickliness ; and a glove of hippopotamus hide 
will not save you from its hidden sting. As a speci- 
men of Western ingenuity to show how much vicious- 
ness can be put into a small parcel it takes the palm; 
it is the infernal machine of the vegetable kingdom. 

There is only the heavenly air and jocund sunshine 
to mitig-ate the universal blankness. But when we 
stop for breakfast at the little station of La Junta 
— which you will please pronounce La Hoonta — so 
wonderful is the atmosphere, so invigorating each 
delicious breath, that it is like -drinking nectar, and 
one can be content with the simple boon of living. 



ON THE WING. 



25 



This queer little town, whicli was scarcely born a year 
ago, and is still, so to speak, in long clothes, is an 
example of the country's rapidity of growth. Already 
"masons are at work on blocks of stone buildings ; new 
stores on the main avenue are filled with complete 
assortments of goods ; neat rows of small wooden 
houses mark the direction of a dozen different streets ; 
the clean little station dining-room has copies of 
Raphael's cherubs and lambrequins of embroidered 
towels, and there is pure water from an artesian well. 
By the time you have tasted the different compounds 
which have been offered under this name since leaving 
home, you will understand the full force of this last 
clause. Even after a good strong dose of old cochitu- 
ate it may be appreciated. 

If, in places hke this, the store should be only a 
shanty, ten feet by twelve, do not let your untrained 
Eastern instincts lead you on a wrong trail of con- 
tempt. The owner of one of these infinitesimal trading 
posts put $550,000 in bank last week after one sale of 
cattle from his back country ranches, — the owner of 
another could draw a check for quarter cf a million, 
and present it to you without letting his business 
suffer. 

The people look more like the soil than the climate 
— long, lean and haggard, — a sort of patient, drag- 
gled air about the women — an unkempt hairiness 
about the men. It seems as if an ounce of New 
England grit would stiffen even back-bones in the 
country. At one place we passed in the gloaming, 
last evening, the male population had turned out en. 



26 ON THE WING. 

masse at the station, and every individual creature 
stood on the platform with the same leg bent at the 
same angle, both hands deep in breeches-pocket, pon- 
dering, with the same dejected wistfulness through 
the smoke of his corn-cob pipe, the volatile spirits of 
our party. They were too far gone in hopelessness 
even to smile upon us. 

On country roads, in small settlements, and around 
station-houses, one is constantly meeting the different 
characters of the modern Western drama. The 
"Jedge " of the Danites squirted tobacco juice with 
artistic nicety within a hair's breadth of my head at 
Emporia. M'hss looked at us from under her tangled 
hair at a cabin door just this side of Las Animas. 
" My Partner " walked into the waiting-room at Flor- 
ence as if he had mistaken it for the theatre dressing- 
room, and Kit with his two "beats" have rej>eated 
themselves until it is fully time to take a farewell per- 
formance. The women nearly all belong to one of 
two types : lank, thin-haired, sad-eyed, sun-bonneted 
and calico-gowned, while they are still drudges, — 
showily dressed, jerky, self-complacent and montagued, 
when they wax prosperous and idle. 

When the Spanish Peaks first come into sight, 
snow-crowned and symmetrical, with a long range be- 
hind clothed in that far-away blue mistiness which 
ever makes mountains beautiful, one draws a long 
breath of surprise and delight. From some unex- 
plained atmospheric condition, they have the effect of 
rising from a deep blue sea, which is a cure for 
home-sick eyes. It is the first glimpse of the natural 



ON THE WING. 2/ 

loveliness of Colorado. Still further, beyond the 
Cheyenne Range, the white head of Pike's Peak rises 
in the still, luminous air. 

There is no object in nature so grandly impres- 
sive as a range of snow-clad summits. The dream of 
my life had been to see Mont Blanc, — Mont Blanc 
with the blue Swiss lakes asleep at its foot, the fair 
Swiss valleys at rest on its bosom, and the wonderful 
beauty of the Swiss landscape throwing its soaring 
majesty into fullest relief. I wonder now whether, 
if Fortune is ever kind enough to let me look upon it, 
some thought of the desolate grandeur of these its 
brother monarchs, rising from the awful calm of their 
grey plains, will not come like the shadow of a still 
more imperial state. 

Pueblo, where we stop to change cars for the nar- 
row-guage road leading to Denver, is by far the most 
characteristic town we have met yet. Any of the 
others might with little change be set down in the 
early stages of an Eastern settlement, and not be much 
out of place ; but here the acres of canvas houses, the 
groups of emigrant v/agons and prairie schooners cor- 
raled under trees or by streams, the quantities of "dug- 
outs," where a door surmounted by a bit of thatched 
roof gives entrance to a tenement hollowed out of the 
hill-side, and the adobe houses — built Mexican 
fashion, with large doors and windows opening on an 
upper balcony — stamp it as belonging to a strange 
world. Up vistas opening from the sandy plains one 
sees broad streets flanked by long rows of stone and 
brick buildings ; three or four railways go zigzaging 



28 ON THE WING. 

in as many different directions ; the suburbs are full 
of large manufacturing interests ; it is swarming with 
active business crowds; yet ten minutes — five min- 
utes — after you have left, just as five minutes before 
reaching it, you cannot believe that anything like 
civilization is within a day's ride of the solemn grey 
sandy desert, with its clumps of sword-grass and 
cactus. 

There had been a little dread in lookinsf forward to 
the change from the spacious roominess of the Pull- 
man to the contracted quarters of the narrower cars ; 
but to our great relief we found the ease of the reclin- 
ing chairs, which fill the carriages of this road, beyond 
anything we had yet used for comfort. One could 
sleep, resting horizontally as in a berth, or sit erect, at 
will, by simply touching a spring under each seat. 
There w^as another unlooked-for pleasure in the total 
absence of dust and ashes during this short ride, that, 
added to the pleasant looking forward to a few days* 
complete rest at Manitou, made the hours passed in 
this way really comfortable. 

We had long ago passed the point where self-respect 
received any shock from the consciousness of dirty 
hands and faces ; we could keep up an air of profound 
respectability with grimy smooches mingled despair- 
ingly with sunburn and tan on our faces, as if in 
mourning for the original virgin white which was once 
theirs. We had broadened into the kind of muscular 
Christianity which Thoreau believed belonged to true 
manhood, and could retain unconsciousness of self and 
surround' ngs under the most desperate straits. This 



ON THE WING. 29 

is one of the liberal uses of travelling. Anyone can be 
charminof and natural and vivacious in a Worth cos- 
tume and a Queen Anne boudoir ; but to be fascinat- 
ing, and meny, and altogether lovely in a travel- 
stained dress, a crushed hat and a pair of torn gloves, 
with soot at the roots of your hair, and patches too 
big for beauty-spots over all the visible creature — as 
some of our feminine women managed — that is to be 
great indeed ! 

The quality of accommodations provided in these 
far-away wilds has been a constant surprise ; the 
fare has been uniformly good, plentiful and well- 
cooked. At the strangest stopping-places, where one 
would imao-ine sandwiches and thick coffee to be the 
extent of resources, we have found a variety always 
abundant and often luxurious. How they manage 
such a quantity of fresh supplies would be perplex- 
ing, if the number of empty tin cans about each new 
settlement did not tell the tale. We are beginning to 
believe the tin can, and its contents, the pioneers of 
civihzation, they make impossibilities possible. Butter 
and coffee, two of the tests of good living, have been 
almost invariably excellent; the exceptions, strangely 
enough, were where one would least look for lapses. 
We have been somewhat sorry not to find more 
changes in the bill of fare; one would think that two 
or three thousand miles of distance might inspire 
some local differences of jnenu, but steaks and chops, 
Saratoga potatoes and broiled kidneys, duck and green 
peas, ice cream and apple-charlotte, follow you in pro- 
cession from one end of the continent to the other. 



30 • ON THE WING. 

There is not much hardship involved in travelhng in 
such company; still an occasional bit of Bohemianism 
in the shape of a ragout of prairie dog, a sirloin of 
prairie chicken, an olla podrida of cactus and cream, 
or a fricassee of horned toads, would be, to say the 
least, a novelty. There can be nothing extremely 
wrong in any of these, when giddy Paris dines on 
horse-flesh and frogs' legs. Shall we pretend to higher 
standards than French gourmets ? There is fortune 
yet in store for the especial Colorado cuisine. 

There was a pleasant little interlude on this same 
narrow-gauge road. We were brought to a stand on 
a side-track for half an hour while waiting for the 
express, which was expressly behind time at this 
particular point, to pass, while it was so ordained by 
fate that four companies of United States cavalry, en 
route for New Mexico and the Indian troubles — going 
in fact, over the very line we were to take a fortnight 
later — should be halted on the same siding. We learned 
a good deal in those thirty minutes of the military feel- 
ing in regard to poor Lo. " No good Indian but a 
dead one," is the whole case in a nutshell. From 
Commander-in-Chief Sherman to his youngest drum- 
mer-boy their voice is all for war, and that a war of 
extermination. It is plain that there is no other solu- 
tion than that of force for the present crisis ; but this 
is a poor substitute for a substantial settling of diffi- 
culties. There never was and never will be a greater 
muddle, than our Government have made over the 
Indian question. These men were bright, brave- 
looking fellows, young and full of spirit, armed to the 



ON THE WING. 



31 



teeth, with a dash and abandon that would suit a dime 
novel hero. A girdle of cartridges in a wide belt 
around the waist, a villainous double-bladed knife 
almost as broad as a trowel, a Colt's army revolver, a 
short musket or rifle — I am not yet well up in mili- 
tary tactics — and a clanging sabre; these were the 
accoutrements. Add if you please a suit of army 
blue, a broad slouched hat and a ferocious moustache, 
a glorious swagger and an erect carriage, and there 
is your soldier complete. They evidently make light 
of their errand, and think that a glimpse of a uniform 
5s enough any day to cause a stampede among the 
Apaches. The pretty girl — pardon, one of the pretty 
girls — of the party held a converzazione with a young 
corporal which would have passed for a flirtation any- 
where else in the* world; I don't know the proper 
name here on the plains. We gave them a rousing 
Eastern cheer, to which the big boy and a few others 
added a Harvard " 'rah." And then we sank again 
into the easy-chairs, and tired, dirty, but happy, turned 
our faces toward "The Garden of the Gods." 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE GARDEX OF THE GODS. 

I DO not wonder that the Indians, with the fine 
poetic appreciation which makes so many of 
their names eloquent, should have called this 
place after the great, mysterious, unknown God whom 
they worshiped — Manitou. The sentimental civilized 
blunderer, who afterwards modified this by describing 
it as a garden, made one of the grand mistakes of a 
lifetime. The impression is of something mighty, 
unreal and supernatural. Of the gods surely — but 
the gods of the Norse Walhalla in some of their 
strange outbursts of wild rage or uncouth playfulness. 
The beauty-loving divinities of Greece and Rome 
could have nothing in common with such sublime 
awkwardness. Jove's ambrosial curls must shake in 
another Olympia than this. Weird and grotesque, 
but solemn and awful at the same time, as if one 
stood on the confines of another world, and soon the 
veil would be rent which divided them. Words are 
worse than useless to attempt such a picture. Per- 
haps if one could live in the shadow of its savage 
grandeur for months, until his soul were permeated, 
language would begin to find itself flowing in proper 
channels, but in the first stupor of astonishment one 
must only hold his breath. The garden itself, the 



34 ON THE WING. 

holy of holies as most fancy, is not so overpowering' 
to me as the vast outlying wildness. To pass in 
between massive portals of rock, of brilliant terra 
cotta red, and enter on a plain miles in extent, covered 
in all directions with magnificent isolated masses of 
the same striking color, each lifting itself against the 
wonderful blue of a Colorado sky with a sharpness of 
outline that would shame the fine cutting of an etch- 
ing ; to find the ground under your feet over the whole 
immense surface carpeted with the same rich tint, 
underlying arabesques of green and gray, where grass 
and mosses have crept; to come upon masses of pale 
velvety gray gypsum set now and again as if to make 
more effective by contrast the deep red which strikes 
the dominant chord of the picture; and always as you 
look through or above to catch the stormy billows of 
the giant mountain range tossed against the sky, with 
the regal snow-crowned massiveness of Pike's Peak 
rising over all, is something once seen never to be 
forgotten. 

Strange, grotesque shapes, mammoth caricatures of 
animals, clamber, or crouch, or spring from vantage 
points hundreds of feet in air. Here a battlemented 
wall is pierced by a round window ; there a cluster of 
slender spires lift themselves; beyond a leaning tower 
slants through the blue air, or a cube as large as a 
dwelling-house is balanced on a pivot-like point at the 
base, as if a child's strength could upset it. " But 
nothin' short of a' earthquake could fetch it," says 
the "Doc," our driver, a fine specimen of the Western 
type, keen, cool and ruddy. Imagine all this scintil- 



ON THE \VIN(;. 



35 



lant with color, set under a dazzling sapphire dome, 
with the silver stems and delicate frondage of young 
cottonwoods in one space, a strong young hemlock 
lifting green symmetrical arms from some high rocky 
cleft in another, or a miniature forest of dwarfed ever- 
greens climbing half way up some craggy pile. This 
can be told ; but the massiveness of sky-piled masonr}', 
the almost infernal mixture of grandeur and gro- 
tesqueness, are beyond expression. After the first 
few moments of wild exclamation points one sinks 
into an awed silence. 

By and by, emerging through another colossal gate- 
way, and following a narrow road built over some 
abandoned Indian trail, one enters upon the confines 
of the most romantic, the most unique of all human 
abiding places, — Glen Eyrie. Fancy this wonderland 
we have been desecrating by trying to describe, as a 
vestibule ; then an avenue, winding for a mile under 
trees, with a new vista opening at each instant. At 
the entrance you pass a little lodge or schoolhouse — 
a sonnet in architecture, if one may so express 
it — the small but perfect rendering of a harmonious 
thought; you cross and recross a rushing, tumbling 
mountain brook over a dozen different bridges, some 
rustic, some of masonry, but each a gem in design 
and fitness ; then at last, after the mind is properly 
tuned, as it were, to perfect accord, the full symphony 
bursts upon you. In the shadow of the eternal rock, 
with the wonderful background of mountain, sur- 
rounded by all that art can lend nature, is this 
delicious anachronism of a Queen Anne house, in 



36 ON THE WING. 

sage-green and deep-dull red, with arched balconies 
under pointed gables, and carved projections over 
mullioned windows, and trellised porches, and stained 
glass loopholes, and an avalanche of roofs. It is 
bewildering, it is out of place: it is naughty, but it's 
so nice. As one of our young men aptly remarked, 
*' It would be paradise with the right girl." 

For a single bit of rugged grandeur the Ute Pass is 
facile princeps. Government has widened and built 
up the old Indian trail, and now a narrow wagon-road 
clings like a thread half way up the precipitous moun- 
tain side, a jagged perpendicular wall below, with a 
rapid mouxitain torrent foaming and fretting at its 
foot, a jagged perpendicular w^all above, with pointed 
splintered edges climbing skyward in one bold sweep. 
A castle is perched on one airy height ; Gog and 
Magog look at each other from two prominent opposite 
points ; profiles and grotesque outhnes are piled upon 
each climbing spur until imagination grows palsied 
with the strain. Obliged to follow the broken line of 
the mountain, the path curves so as at times almost to 
turn upon itself, and looking back as your horse winds 
slowly up the zigzag passage, you are lost in wonder 
and dismay at the temerity which brought you here. 
It was up this trail that the Utes, the original "big 
injuns" of the country, used to pass to and from their 
reservations beyond the mountain and their happy 
hunting-grounds in the plains below. It needs little 
fancy to see them laden with spoils of the chase or 
painted for the war-path, passing in single file through 
the sombre ravine which seems theirs by right. At 



ON THE WING. 3^ 

different points mineral springs of iron, of sulphur, or 
of magnesia, bubble up as if forced from a siphon, each 
impregnated with carbonic acid until it effervesces 
like soda-water. They are the pleasantest mineral 
waters I ever tasted ; the usual flavor of " warm 
flatirons" being very well masked by the sharpness 
of the chemical salts ; and you will never know what 
lemonade means, until you have tried it sparkling 
with this natural champagne. 

At last and entirely, you realize now that you have 
reached a border country. The old Pike's Peak and 
later Leadville roads, pass in front of the hotel, and 
at any moment of the day a cavalcade strange to 
Eastern eyes may be seen passing by. It is Buffalo 
Bill and his train of Indian scouts, picturesque in 
broad sombrero and fringed buckskin leggins ; or a 
train of emigrant wagons, household utensils piled 
in one, stove-pipes fastened to the sides, women 
and children gathered in the others, and a couple of 
spare horses, or sometimes a cow, bringing up the 
rear. A moment ago a long line of pack mules with 
jingling bells trotted past, a wild-looking muleteer in 
a high Mexican saddle, on the last, snapping his long 
whip with a crack like the report of a rifle ; and just 
now a dashing young rider on a beautiful gray mare, 
with spurs on the heels of his long boots, and saddle- 
bags flapping at each side of his gallant steed, has 
flashed up the broad mountain road like a winged 
arrow. The people ride magnificently, with great 
daring and unconsciousness, with a pose as if they 
were part and parcel of the animal they bestride. 



38 ON THE WING. 

Even young girls fly past with an abandon that 
takes one's breath away, slim, erect, with small jockey 
hats and plain, well-fitting habits. A pretty girl, I 
believe, is never so pretty as when on horseback ; but 
I never knew before how much her dress had to do 
with her lovehness. The long, sweeping train, cover- 
ing the flanks of the flying steed with its graceful, 
pennon-like curve, throws the rounded bust and 
shapely neck and head into good relief by forming an 
admirable pendant, and hides the ungracious bend of 
the knee bent over the pommel. Some of our own 
pretty maids rode boldly and well, but the awkward- 
ness of the short travelhng-dress was too much for 
even their native grace to conquer, and I was glad to 
see them dismount. 

The horses are all splendid animals ; the men 
would be, if they took as much care of themselves as 
of their beasts. The village blacksmith is a real 
study : he walks down the long, red road, his broad 
trousers tucked into immense cowhides, a wide belt 
around his massive waist, a flapping brim slouched 
over his brow, and that swinging, Indian gait, in which 
all motion seems to spring from the hips. There is an 
air of jaunty elegance about the straight, stalwart 
form that is more in keeping with the place than any- 
thins: else we have seen. 

We took two days for a trip to Denver, and from it 
to Black Hawk and Central City. The view of the 
mountain range which one gets on this route is en- 
chantingly beautiful. Toward the end the road crosses 
at such an angle that you see a long line of peaks 



ON THE WIN(;. 39 

reaching nearly a hundred miles across the gray plain, 
and lifting snow-capped summits to the sky till they 
melt in the far distance. Denver itself is laid out on 
a most opulent scale, and must be of immense interest 
to business men. It boasts in its new Opera Mouse, 
one of the finest theatres in the United States; a 
little gorgeous in tone, in accordance with Western 
ideas, but really beautiful and of fine finish. When 
you see in the windows of the large stores the latest 
fashion in plush embroideries and Paris fineries : 
when you ride for two mortal hours behind a pair of 
swift horses and only pass over one small part of its 
large territory ; when you hear statistics of wealth in 
banks, mines, smelting works and manufactures that 
quite upset your slow New England notions, you will 
begin to realize what this wonderful West is. "East, 
you talks of things, but here, we does them," said our 
driver, with the naive pride of a man who knew which 
was the better part. The number of men who had 
made their pile, gone into stocks, got cleaned out, 
tried again and struck it rich, come back and built a 
palace, or a church, or a bank, or a block in Denver, 
was enough to make one's hair stand on end. And 
this in a place where twenty years ago the redskin and 
mountain coyote had it all to themselves. 

Think of having to come to this city of the plains 
to find the first waiter who ever was known to refuse 
a tip ! I will not return good for evil by telling where 
he is. In a place which boasts thirty or forty hotels, 
some of them with 270 sleeping-rooms, you may take 
your choice and find him out. But the rara avis 
belongs in Denver, with its other natural curiosities. 



40 ON THE WING. 

I am tired of saying that this is a wonderful 
country, yet nothing else relieves one's over-charged 
feelings. A few miles outside the city, going toward 
the northwest, is the entrance to Clear Creek Canon, 
in which for fifteen or twenty miles the train follows 
the bed of a mountain brook, through a narrow wind- 
ing opening not much broader than the width of the 
rail, at the foot of precipices from 900 to 1,200 feet 
high. Each spur overlaps the other so desperately, 
that the track actually writhes in convulsions around 
the twisted corners. In the entire fifteen miles 
there are not two hundred feet of straight line, and 
often, sitting in the central compartment of a train 
of three cars, we could see the two sturdy puffing 
little engines in front and the rear car at the same 
time. As if this were not enough to set one's ideas 
topsy-turvy, there are a succession of awful tableaux, 
where nature seems inspired to her grandest efforts, 
and where a frenzied tumult of wild grandeur forces 
one to an almost painful climax of attention. The 
formation of rock, which tends, all through the parts 
of Colorada we have yet seen, toward an appearance 
of buttresses and castled crags, runs into a luxuriance 
of wild and picturesque forms along the entire route. 
Meantime, you are climbing vmconsciously at a rate 
which brings you three thousand feet higher at the 
Elack Hawk station than where 3'ou started four hours 
before, and you finish by an immense Z up the last 
mountain-side, which leaves you in Central City quite 
over the heads of the whole lower world. Anything 
so wildlv trvine to the nerves as this last sudden rise 



ON THE WING. 41 

I never felt before. Mt. Washington was dreadful 
as anything could be, but this was a thousand times 
worse ; for here there was not even a grooved wheel 
to cling to. It was a plain, bare, every-day track, 
and a plain, bare, every-day engine, without cogs or 
cranks, or any other unusual attachment, to brace up 
a poor lone, lorn woman's faith. When we finally 
stopped at the little station, it was wnth a sense of 
relief which culminated in one deep-concerted sigh. 
I would not have crone down that incline a<rain, for 
all the gold in the Bobtail mine over which we were 
running. There was something unholy in tempting 
Providence so. And if we did lose our rubbers in 
climbing down the rocky street through the little 
mining camp, on our way to meet the train at the 
lower level, wdiose business is it but our own? At 
least we saved peace of mind; and what is temporal 
loss to spiritual comfort.'' 

There were two days of heavenly weather, after our 
return to Manitou, and, after that, the deluge. They 
told us there was no w^et weather in Colorado, except 
at certain seasons. It is true; it never rains; but it 
pours — sometimes. O how it pours! Yet so heavenly 
beautiful is the delicious clearness of the atmosphere 
that unless we felt or heard it we would absolutely 
not have known there was any rain falling, when it 
was pouring from above like the sluices of a mill. 
The soft and lambent air was as fresh and bright as 
sunshine would have made it in other places. Driv- 
ing through Colorado Springs one day, that loveliest 
village of the plain, with the prairie reaching to the 



42 ON THE WING. 

horizon on one side, and the chmbing mountain range 
piercing heaven at the other, we had a fascinating 
experience of the swift changes which belong to these 
elevated regions. A low cloud of pale luminous gray- 
hid the soaring peaks from sight, and a shadow rested 
on the nearer side so heavily, that it was stained 
to deep purple blackness. SuddenW, in one spot, 
the whelming clouds drifted apart, and in the jagged 
opening a range of snowy tops kissed the blue sky, 
glowing with a burst of color which would gladden 
the saddest heart. I do not wonder that H. H. fell in 
love with this beautiful place, and lavished the full 
wealth of her delightful power in singing its praises. 
It would bankrupt a less-gifted nature even to paint 
its glories, much less be their interpreter. But we 
found the old story true, that no one is a prophet 
among his own people. Our hackman could n't point 
out her house ; he " allowed it was the cottage up 
thar, but didn't know for sure." Another time, sitting 
by my window at early morning, while earth seemed 
wrapped in the soft haze of dreamland, of a sudden 
the curtain of cloud began to roll from the windows 
of the deep, intense heaven of blue above it, and the 
poetry of sunshine — the sunshine of Colorado — 
blazed with golden glory over the world. 



CHAPTER V. 

IT was during the first day at Manitou that we 
made acquaintance with the burros. It is the 
nightingale of Colorado ; its range of voice is 
limited, consisting indeed of only two notes; but the 
amount of eloquence, the superb quality, the deep 
resonance and flexible sinuosity which can be thrown 
by this natural musician into such a small compass, 
is, like everything else here, tremendous. As he 
lopes down the village street, the larboard ear in air 
while the starboard droops limply, the long tapir-like 
nose quivering with the mighty volume of sound 
which is pouring through it, the sloping Chinese eyes 
looking at you sideways with the lack-lustre expres- 
sion of the race, and an artistic kick thrown in 
occasionally to produce the tremolo which adds the 
last touch of grace to the singing voice, you are 
overwhelmed. When its Scriptural namesake spoke 
to Balaam, he was never more surprised. 

We had a vague impression that on striking these 
hiofh altitudes the ills which flesh is heir to would 
vanish; but there is, alas ! no royal road to health. 
Even in the upper atmosphere of this rarer, purer 
world, there are such things as pull-backs. Aside 
from the difficulty of l^reathing into which the first 
plunge dipped most of the party, it seemed for a time 



44 ON THE WING. 

to disarrange everything connected with throat and 
lungs, so that 

"Those new coughed who never coughed before, 
And those who always coughed now coughed the more." 

For a few days it sounded like an out-of-door clinic 
for throat diseases. But at the same time there was 
an invigoration, a plenary indulgence of oxygen in 
every breath, that eased the most profound fatigue in 
a few minutes. After a walk or a climb that would 
have made your bones ache for days on that beloved 
stern and rock-bound coast at home, you would be up 
and at it again in an hour's time as fresh as a daisy. 
But the tendency to bronchial trouble placed us all at 
a disadvantage. The wet weather which came, and 
I believe went, with us, most unusual at this time of 
year, may have had something to do with it ; but the 
altitude was the principal factor. When you live and 
move in the clouds around the head of Mt. Washing- 
ton, or rather above them, you must expect to pay the 
piper. But if we had had only pleasant weather, 
Avould we have known the fascination of those cloud 
effects up the billowy mountain sides ? Would we 
have seen them under every possible variation, from 
thunder to snow, from moonlight to inky blackness ? 
When I looked out that last morning, would the old 
moon have been sailing her silver boat through the 
blue zenith, while pale, rosy flames were springing 
from the horizon upward, touching the snowy moun- 
tain peaks with the real Alpine glow? Once, in a 
ramble to the Cave of the Winds, we were weather- 
bound for an hour in a lime-burner's hut by the side 



ON THE WING. 



45 



of the trail, while a furious hail-storm rolled through 
the canon, and five minutes after the majestic columns 
in the Temple of Isis, a thousand feet above our 
heads, were blazing and glowing, as if under some 
reflected shower of sunshine. The flying clouds lifted 
here and there, from peaks and battlements ; the in- 
spired air tingled in every vein; the heavenly glow 
and radiance flashed into your soul, — and ten minutes 
after you were in the midst of another swift storm of 
hail, or snow, or rain, as if sunshine never belonged 
to the world. But little we recked in the safe shelter 
of the wayside cabin while the fierce fantasy of 
clouds worked its wild way in the narrow gorge above, 
and, framed in the ruined lime-kiln opposite, our 
picturesque young man, never so killing before, in full 
mountain suit of blouse and knickerbocker, stood 
like a picture of a blonde Tyrolese jager in the ruined 
arch. It was not unusual throuo-h these davs to have 
four alternate storms in the course of a single hour, 
wnth clear skies between ; but, owing to the brilliant 
rarity of the atmosphere, we were never sure it was 
raining, until we either felt or actually saw it. And 
this when it was pouring a ton to the square inch! 
Another most strange fact was that the peculiar 
formation of the soil prevented any formation of mud, 
the roads hardening and deepening in color, till they 
looked as if laid in red cement. These were both 
novel features to those w^ho were used to the dreary 
footing, after a four-days' rain in Boston. 

It was here for the first time we saw the magpie, a 
large bird in half-mourning, alternate black and white. 



46 ON THE WING. 

The Colorado blue-bird, an exquisite little creature, 
with a bit of the deep sky meshed in his wings, 
favored us several times in the Garden of the Gods; 
but we were too early, really, to see or know anything 
of the birds of the country. 

The Beebee House proved to be one of the 
cleanest, tidiest and most home-like we had seen yet. 
Its beds were perfection; its rooms clean and tidy; 
its hotel-clerk a model for his kind in amiability and 
helpfulness, and its open fireplace, full of blazing logs 
in each of the large parlors, cheer and comfort itself. 
But it owned a corps of waiters who ought to be 
broken in before they were allowed to swing things 
in such a brazenly, reckless fashion. They had a 
Rocky Mountain style of flinging plates and dishes, 
so that one never knew whether they were aimed at 
one's head or the table, and a jaunty way of tipping 
over full soup-plates and broiled steak, until you were 
in tremulous uncertainty as to whether dinner would 
"be an internal or external application. It was high 
art, in its way, because they never actually allowed 
anything to slop over, but of a kind which way-worn 
travellers could well dispense with. 

The men were invariably polite and well-behaved 
to a degree that struck one in sharp contrast to their 
uncared-for appearance. We never stepped into an 
elevator in any house, from the time of leaving 
Chicago, without having every hat lifted until we left 
it again. A group of rough, unkempt miners would 
step into the mud on a bad crossing, in order that 
your feet might pass dry-shod ; and the moment they 



ON THE WING. 47 

were addressed by a woman, their pipes were taken 
from the mouth. In Central City, that queer little 
above-the-world hole in the clouds, one of our party 
entered a small grocery to try and get her muddy 
boots cleansed. The proprietor not only provided the 
means, but wanted to do all necessary work himself, 
and fnially left his place uncared for, while he took us 
some distance up the street to show v/here we would 
fmd planks properly laid to avoid the mud. One 
somehow hardly looks for this in situations where 
the people show themselves so sublimely careless in 
small matters. 

It was here at Manitou that v/e saw the original of 
that wonder-painting cf the Mountain of the Holy 
Cross, by Thomas Moran. The Enghsh gentleman 
who has the happiness cf owning it had the rare good 
taste to understand that everything else in his home 
should be subordinate to this exquisite centre-piece, 
so that the house is really only the setting for the 
picture. The room in which you find it opens from 
the outer air, and is made harmoniously beautiful in 
every way. At one side a great alcove, lighted at the 
top, throws all the sunshine upon the canvas, while 
a gem cf a conservatory, hung with heavy festoons 
of passion-vines, gorgeous in the greatest wealth of 
buds and blossoms, in deep-red color, opens from 
the opposite corner. The design cf the house is of 
the English cottage order, surrounded by a lustrous 
green lawn, with a rapid -roaring brook tumbling 
through and coming to the foreground under a rustic 



48 ON THE WING. 

bridge. One has only to step from the wonderwork 
inside to the wonderwork without, and each is worthy 
of the other. 

We left this lovely spot with real regret. What a 
golden summer one might pass in that happy valley 
among its kindly and simple people, if fashion did not 
rush in with "the season" to spoil it all. It seems 
to have more than its share of the world's blessinof. 
Such air, such light, such majesty and such sweet- 
ness, are more than belong to any one spot. Not 
adieu, but au revoir, to the Garden of the Gods ! 

The m.oment one leaves Colorado Springs again on 
the way to Pueblo, the same dreadfully uninteresting 
country, with the poor, tiny houses that seem so bare 
of all life's comforts, appears. If people had souls 
enough to appreciate the air and light which are so 
lavishly showered upon them, there might be some 
mitigation of the poverty of living, kith and kin, in a 
bare board shanty of one or two rooms opening di- 
rectly on the dry desert of the outer world ; but I am 
afraid even this little leaven hardly comes to leaven 
the great lump of poverty. 

Beyond Pueblo the Arkansas widens into a rather 
sluggish, muddy stream, pretty in nothing except its 
windings and the delicate freshness of cottonwoods 
here and there on its banks, which are always newly 
lovely to us. It has, besides, for many miles, a fringe 
of fortifications in wonderful perfection, some in per- 
fect cap-a-pie fighting order, some ruined and broken, 
but altogether one of the most picturesque and com- 



ON THE WING. 



49 



plete pieces of nature's workmanship we have met 
yet. It seems utterly impossible to believe that the 
walls and battlements, which appear of such solid 
masonry, should not have been laid with hands, or 
that the eye of some human architect did not direct 
the soaring grace of those lofty towers, or the solemn 
strength of these long lines of ramparts. Every- 
where the great gray plains, stretching to right and 
left with sombre deadness of color; everywhere the 
poor, low houses of adobe or logs, which are part 
and parcel of the universal monotony ! The little 
dining-stations show in their confusion and bustle the 
want of proper understanding of the needs of the 
travelling public ; still they furnish plentiful meals 
and give a fair variety. We have been somewhat 
spoiled by the lavish luxury of cuisine which the 
larger hotels have given us ; but the healthy appetite 
which belongs of right to every honest traveller, 
stands us in good stead, and the blessed boon which 
we enjoy, of plenty of time, even for toothpicks, makes 
the plainest bread and meat enjoyable. At first we 
were absurdly conscious of doing an unusual thing 
every time we tore off a coupon; now we are begin- 
ning to imagine what a delight it would be if we could 
meet every need of life in the same way, by offering a 
ticket to buy it off. 

Placer is down in our note-books as being the first 
spot from which can be seen the Sierra Blanca, the 
"highest peak in Colorado, and second highest in the 
United States. It is also down in my personal mem- 
ory for having the following unique and extremely 



so 



ON THE WING. 



Western tradition, as a grace before meat, over the 
dining-room door: — 

"In God we trust; 
The rest must pay cash. 
To trust is to bust, — 
To bust is Hell ! 

^ TRUST ! 
NO J bust! BEAR THIS IN MINO ! " 

/ hell! 

We saw at Canon City, just as the mountains began 
to draw together again for the Grand Canon of the 
Arkansas, a gang of convicts at work on the road 
leading through the valley. The State penitentiary is 
located here, and convict labor does much in the 
way of building and opening new thoroughfares. A 
gaunt figure sat at each end with loaded rifle cocked 
and aimed at the group of men between. In another 
moment we had whirled between rocky walls which 
hid the sinister picture, but its harsh effect lived 
longer. 

Of the Canon itself, I would rather say not one 
word, but bow the head in reverent silence before this 
handiwork of the Lord. But for the sake of the dear 
eyes at home which may never look upon it, and 
which still love to follow the steps that have wandered 
so far from them, I must try to speak. Those who 
have looked upon its awful grandeur will realize the 
powcrlcssness of description. The railroad runs 
through a deep, narrow passage at the base of oppos- 
ing and overlapping spurs of mountains, always fol- 
lowing the tortuous windings of the stream, which 
flows between with the same wild swiftness which 



ON THK WING. 5 1 

made Clear Creek Canon so dreadful to weak nerves. 
Grown more familiar now, we scarcely notice this 
headlong rush as cause for dismay ; but we cannot 
grow familfar with the massive wildness of the over- 
hanging cliffs above. Gradually the sweeping peaks 
rise higher ; the rushing river grows deeper and louder; 
its color changes to a perfect raw sienna, which makes 
a delightful warm tint in the foreground. The soaring 
mountains leap more boldly skyward, till they seem to 
scale the very ramparts of heaven, cleft through their 
centre of everlasting rock by some stupendous power 
we can only guess at. Whatever is grandest and 
wildest in nature, pours itself with prodigious lavish- 
ness above and around, until, as the train thunders 
upon a hanging bridge which spans a deep abyss, the 
sense of might and awfulness is so heavy on the soul, 
that it results in a sense of real physical oppression. 
The roaring of the rapids, intensified by precipices 
which lift themselves at each side ; the solemn shadow 
thrown even at noonday from those mighty ledges ; 
the stupendous majesty Avhich sweeps you from all 
familiar things and sets you face to face with the 
Creator, combine to impress an unearthly feeling of 
loneliness and awe which remains stamped with the 
memory of the place forever. In the bit of dazzling 
blue that showed itself over the high fortress like 
crags, so high that eyes, as well as spirit, had to soar 
to reach their summits, two immense eagles went 
sweeping in airy circles, till they disappeared behind 
the topmost peak of all. It was the only sign of life 
which would not have been out of harmony with the 



52 



ON THE WING. 



solemnity of the spot. A sombre x'cili ng of firs 
covered the lower levels of the mountains ; but above, 
only the bare, barren rock rose with splintered edges 
into pinnacles and domes, stained here and there with 
blackness of age, riven by thunder-bolts, or jeweled 
with sparkling spray of leaping waterfalls. Even after 
passing this culminating point there was no anti- 
climax. As the road and river-bed widen, the heights 
open here and there, showing still other peaks beyond, 
but all yet dark and awful. B3^-and-by a single tree, or 
a group of cottonwoods, throw their fleecy, silver- 
stemmed branches like a point of light against the 
grim background, or a single snow-powdered peak of 
the Sangre de Cristo rises far away. Constantly 
changing as the whirling road flies east or west, you 
get by instants some new picture, until at last, through 
a sudden cleft, the whole beautiful sunn}^ range rises 
against the horizon, one rounded, dazzling peak 
superbly prominent in the centre, — "clothed in white 
samite, mystic, wonderful." Just as this glorious 
vision bursts upon your raptured sight, there rushes . 
down through the centre of a gorge in the rocky 
chain, as sombre as blackened trunks of dead trees 
and funereal firs can make it, a cascade, a torrent, a 
perfect avalanche of tender glowing green, where a 
thick belt of young trees have followed the windings 
of the mountain-side into the open space below. For 
hours there is nothing to break the strain produced 
by this immense manifestation of sublimity: you are 
obliged to sit in awed and awful silence while it pours 
3n upon overwrought nerves and brain, without, as 



ON THE WING. 53 

one of the party aptly remarked, even being able to 
dam it for awhile and take a rest. 

Two hours after leaving Salida, at the end of this 
over-exciting trip, we were hurled into another, which 
was, if such a thing could be, even more gloriously 
terrible. Up the great Continental Divide,* the rail- 
road clambers five thousand feet in a distance of 
twenty-eight miles, to Marshall's Pass, bearing you 
from the summer lands below, to the region of eternal 
ice and snow above. As the crow flies, the distance 
travelled to the summit would not be over eight miles ; 
the others are taken up in devious twistings and wind- 
ings backward and forward over the mountain. In 
the course of the route, you pass over giddy trestles, 
on the brink of narrow precipices, by the side of 
weighty, overhanging cliffs, or curving edges of black 
ravines, rising ever higher and higher, until the sight 
of the dizzy, swooping valleys make you catch breath 
hard, and you would gladly weigh a thousand tons, so 
as to have some effect in balancing the swaying train 
which so airily spins above them. It was toward 
evening, and we followed the light upward from one 
level to another, until just at sunset we emerged on a 
scene of such unearthly beauty as those who had the 
blessed fortune of seeing, will never forget. Turning 

* It may be well here to define some of the terms used in connection 
■with Western mountain scenery, — Mesa: a high table-land or plain 
between mountains; Divide: a mountain chain separating two sets of 
table-lands; the Continental Divide, between the Atlantic and Pacific 
slopes; Cafion : a passage between mountains, winding through the 
lowest level; Pass: a trail built on the mountain-side through a Canon » 
Gorge : tlie wildt-st and most prcciiutous part of a Canon. 



54 ON THE WING. 

a sharp spur of the mountain, we spun over a trestle* 
bridge, which took a curve, a chmb, and a bound 
across a deep gorge all at once; and on the instant 
the sun shone on a line of exquisite peaks melting 
away in the dim horizon, their snowy summits trans- 
figured with the last rosy flush of dying day. Far 
below, purple night shadows were gathering already 
in deep ravines and narrow passes ; while above, the 
sky was still opalescent with the faint, clear tints 
which make twilight linger so long in this rare atmos- 
phere. O, heavenly heights, fair Mountains of the 
Snow ! will we ever again look upon anything so won- 
derful, until we cross the border-land to the Blessed 
Country, and through the gates ajar see rismg in the 
radiant air the shining hills of Paradise ! 

In the Veta Pass, which we crossed next day, the 
same manifestations of grandeur and majesty repeated 
themselves. In each case, nearly a day spent in 
crossing the barren plains prepares one for the effect 
to be produced, and gives the sharpness of contrast 
to the two opposing scenes. A mirage, which lasted 
for some hours, gave the idea of blue water at the 
base of a mountain-chain on the left, which had an 
exquisite effect in the distance. If this country only 
had lakes, it would be too dangerously near perfec- 
tion. The mule-shoe curve, which sweeps up to the 
higher levels on this new trail, is another blood- 
curdling experience ; but so sure had we grown by 
this time of the security of our running-gear, that we 
rode through thirty or forty miles in the cab of the 
engine. The effect of coming in this way into the 



ON THE WING. 55 

mysteries of Toltec Gorge is, to say the least, thrill- 
ing. You have something of the glow of an explorer 
who discovers for the first time some new and beauti- 
ful land. I do not wonder any longer, that, simply 
from the love of this excitement, men should be found 
willing to brave danger of suffering and death, 
uplifted beyond ordinary human endurance for the 
sake of the glow which comes when the secret of 
some hitherto unknown spot lies unlocked before 
them. There is one superb moment here, w^hen the 
engine, after poising like a bird on the extreme edge 
of a sheer precipice one thousand seven hundred feet 
deep, turns with a swift leap and buries itself with a 
noise like ten thousand devils in the blackness of a 
tunnel, from which it emerges to sweep into the sun- 
light, hanging to the face of the cliff on top cf an 
awful gorge, whose shattered sides reach the tumbling 
river below. In another place it passes what appears 
like the ruins of a heathen temple, its gigantic idols 
still erect on their pedestals, looking with hideous 
grotesqueness at the temerity w^hich found them out. 
The formation of this group of rocks is not dissimilar 
to that in the Garden of the Gods, except in color. 

Our audacity to do and dare grew with what it fed 
on ; after riding inside the engine, we tried riding 
outside of it. I cannot account for the change which 
made this possible in a couple of not usually heroic 
women. Perhaps the stupendous boldness which per- 
meated Nature, the magnificent dash which entered 
into all she planned and did, the very audacity of her 
conceptions, may liave unconsciously raised our nigral 



56 ON THE WING. 

Standard and strung us to a pitch that made us 
ready for any adventure. Be this as it may, we rode 
on the cow-catcher from the Toltec Gorge down to 
Antonita, twenty miles away ; and when you have 
ridden on a cow-catcher down a precipitous, mighty 
mountain-side, through gorges and tunnels, under 
ledges and crags, around sweeping curves that spin 
dizzily through the air, while ten feet before you all 
visible foothold seems to end, and the next bound 
wall launch 3-ou into space, — when you have done this, 
you have received your baptism of hre so far as 
adventure is concerned. You begin then to beheve in 
the Eternal Fates ; you can afford for the rest of your 
life to make a retrousse nose at people who have 
only known common-place experiences. The thrill of 
exultation which this wild flight through the air pro- 
duced, especially as night drew on, and only the 
meteoric glare of the head-hght dissipated the pro- 
found shadows through which we passed ; the tremen- 
dous force of the power behind us, all noise and 
fury, contrasted with the tranquil calm of the night, 
serene and beautiful, with one pure evening star 
gleaming in the clear sky, made a whirl of emotion 
Avhich was nearer intoxication than anything else. 
When we finally were taken from our perch and 
brought into the lighted car, half dazed and tremulous 
from the unconscious strain, it was as I imagine it 
must be, after drinking champagne, while exhilaration 
h.as still tlie upper hand cf shakiness. After this, 
anything short of shooting up a mountain at an angle 
of fort}'-five degrees will l;e a mere l:>agatelle. The 



ON THE WING. 57 

future hides what the Vo Semite holds in store ; but 
it is no use to tell us it will ever bring forth anything 
comparable to that last night in Colorado. 

There were some obvious and striking advantages 
about this riding on the cow-catcher : you escaped 
dust and smoke, while the open air did away with 
any unusual sound. There was very little jarring 
motion ; much less than even in the sacred seclusion 
of the Pullman. Inside the cab it was not so pleasant : 
a pandemonium of shrieks and groans, as the dif- 
ferent levers regulated steam or motion ; an odious 
smell of badly-cooked grease ; a sensation of being 
blinded by red-hot sparks and cinders, or roasted to 
death by the almost infernal heat; an insecure seat 
on a high wooden stool, with your modest draperies 
twisted about you, and a jerky, broken motion like 
the trotting of a badly-trained horse, — these combine 
against it; but even here the novelty and dehght of 
the situation easily overcomes them all. 

Perhaps it was the mental exhaustion consequent 
on such a strain, that made us, like Silas Wegg, 
"drop into poetry" that night, at sight of a charming 
face among the waiter-girls at the station-hotel, where 
we stopped for supper. She was a bright little crea- 
ture, and, I trust, will forgive the doggerel, since it 
sings the praise of — 

The Pretty Maiu ok Antonito. 

'Twas in the supper-room at night, 

Wliile waitinj:; for a chance to eat O! 
We saw the vision of delight, 

Tlie pretty maid of Antonito ! 



58 ON THE WING. 

Her eyes were dark and very bright, 

As if she came from Spain or Quito, — 
Her pearly teeth were small and white, 

This bonny maid of Antonito. 

Her hair was parted at the side, 

Her step was light as a mosquito, 
She had a pretty air of pride, 

This charming maid of Antonito. 

We do not know her rightful name, 

Perhaps 'twas Jane, perhaps Pepito — 
But still we love her just the same, 

The witching maid of Antonito. 

If we could pack her in a tin. 

Or roll her in a small paquito, 
O wouldn't we just scoop her in, 

And take her far from Antonito ! 

She looked so fresh, so pure, so gay, 

So red her lips, her smile so sweet O, 
We could not tear ourselves away 

From that fair maid of Antonito. 

But where she goes, or what her state, 

If married she or senorita, — 
Adois! treat her kindly, Fate! 

The pretty maid of Antonito. 

We came back through the Vcta Pass in the darkest 
midnight ever formed ; and just as we were crawling 
at a snail's pace up to the highest point, the coui^ling 
between the cars broke. We have grown so used to 
terrible risks now, that nothing trivial upsets one •, 
yet I must confess this spoiled my repose for the 
night. To wake at some sudden shock and find that 
you are nine thousand three hundred and thirty-five 
feet above the sea level and the little house at 



ON THE WING. 59 

home, and that something connected with the ma- 
chinery of your vehicle has gone to pieces, is not 
particularly reassuring. When you are conscious 
that your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness depend upon the welding of a 
bit of iron, or the strength of a piece of wood, to 
hear the crack of doom in either of them is inex- 
pressibly chilling, especially when you are up in the 
air instead of being on terra firma. The system of 
automatic brakes is brought to such perfection, how- 
ever, that the train can be stopped, even on the 
steepest grade, within a distance of twenty-eight feet ; 
and every atom of apparatus connected with cars 
or engine is subjected to such anxious and constant 
watchfulness that an accident is very seldom heard of. 

Everywhere, except when we struck the mountains, 
the same barren gray plains, with only cactus and 
sage-brush, or sparse bunches of buffalo grass and 
moss, to relieve their monotony. The tiny houses 
are built either of unpainted logs or adobe, neither of 
which possess any distinctive coloring. Only the 
resplendent sky and rich sunshine take the dreariness 
away. But whenever, far off, the dim blue heights 
were climbing the horizon, or better still, the snowy 
peaks shone radiant in the eye of day, there was 
joy enough to fill the present and lay up fair store for 
the future. 

Before climbing the Raton Pass, which separates 
Colorado from New Mexico, next morning, we 
stopped at Trinidad. On the mountain just in front 
of the station, a castle, so perfect as to be astonishing 



6o ON THE WING. 

even in this country of astonishing rock fantasies, 
rears its battlemented walls and round towers as fairly 
as if planned by the hand of an architect. A peculiar 
effect is produced by a tree growing at one point just 
within the massive portal, which has precisely the 
shape of a flag raised on a long staff. It looks like a 
banner flung to the breeze to show that the royal 
family are at home. 

Within the last two days we have passed through 
and over, five of the grandest and wildest passes in 
America. I find that the guide-books speak of that 
of La Veta as overlooking the most beautiful valley ; 
Tbut, to us, the Grand Canon was supremest, because 
of the snow-clad peaks in sight. Those radiant 
heights, lifting themselves in the far, serene distance, 
have spoiled us for everything else. We found in the 
gorges some lovely flowers, like white Christmas 
roses, with bunches of mountain larkspur, and a pretty 
blossom, half blue, half pink, that ought to be a pet 
with French milliners. Along the plains were spikes 
of pale cream-color, like a sweet pea in shape, and 
golden coreopsis with deep brown hearts ; while at 
Las Vegas the hillsides were covered with English 
daisies, or something so like the " wee, modest, 
crimson-tippet flower," that it would pass for it with 
any one but a botanist. 

We have grown really attached to Colorado : it is 
fascinating in spite of its barrenness, and progressive 
in the face of its slowness; for it is awfully slow. 
Even its crack city of Denver is behind the right 
Boston time by two good hours. 



CHAPTER VI. * 

THE BORDER LANDS OF ROMANCE. 

COMING across tlie mountains into Raton this 
morning, we entered the border land of 
modern romance. In those great plains, 
through which we have been riding all day, and among 
the beautiful mountains lying beyond, the fabulous 
pfifts of the blind ^roddess Fortune have been showered 
at a rate which has often changed common men, in a 
few short years, to princes. A kind friend has just 
brought in a story, like Aladdin's lamp, of how 
riches poured upon one group of men, poor, unknown, 
and in no way gifted beyond the clear-headed Eastern 
foresight which grasps possibilities and makes cer- 
tainties of them. They bought, almost for nothing, 
a whole tract of country here, with which to open a 
colonization scheme, and in the course of develop- 
ment found gold mines, silver mines, coal mines, 
asphalt, platinum, and heaven knows what of mineral 
treasure. The land behind and beside these includes 
millions of acres for stock-raising, river valleys for 
farming, and — hold your breath while you think of 
it! — one of the snowy ranges that have snared our 
hearts forever. Think of the more than imperial 
magnificence of owning one of these connecting links 
with heaven ! The president, who is now in Europe 



62 ON THE WING. 

elaborating his plans, lives royally, not far from the 
line of road we travelled to-day, in old Spanish 
fashion, with forty horses in his stables; with separate 
buildings gathered around inclosed court-yards for 
the different uses of his household and guests ; with 
the wealth of the Incas, and a gorgeous hospitality 
like that of the brilliant but unfortunate Ralston. 
And a few years ago this Prince Fortunatus was 
cutting grass or herding cattle on the plains, with re- 
volvers in his belt to hold at bay marauding Indians, 
earning with the sweat of his brow his laborer's pay 
of a couple of dollars a day. Was there ever a more 
fanciful fairy story, only that this is real life ! 

Immense flocks of sheep are coming into range 
along the railway line now for the first time, so nume- 
rous that it seems in the distance as if the great 
plains had been piled in spots with thousands on 
thousands of round gray rocks. They are most com- 
monplace and uninteresting animals it is possible to 
conceive, awkward, dust-colored and stupid. Where 
do Schreyer and V^erboeckhoven get their models ? 
Wliat different breeds must pose for those soft-eyed, 
soft-fleeced mothers, those tender snowy lambs, those 
proud-horned patriarchs of the groups they delight in ! 
They are watched by shepherds ; but neither are they, 
by any means, the ideal creatures. Bearded like the 
pard, mounted like Australian bushwackers, riding 
like daredevils, u^ly, and I am sorry to say dirty, 
they as little resemble the idylic creations of the 
French and Italian school as a potato does an apricot. 
A certain amount of slovenliness is secretly dear to 



ON THE WING. 63 

the artistic temperament ; even rags and tatters can 
be so well " set " as to produce an effect which good 
broadcloth could never inspire ; but the brutal, greasy, 
honest frowziness of these sheep-herders, has no more 
to do with the picturesque, than the sheep they tend. 
If such "shepherds watched their flocks by night," 
I wonder if the angel of the Lord would ever have 
appeared to them. 

Now adobe houses come thick and fast; indeed, 
they are the only habitations to be seen, except when 
now and again some small town boasts a few un- 
painted, one-roomed cottages, as saloons or hotel 
buildings. The perfect level of the plains begins to be 
broken by undulations and low, scrubby hills, covered 
with something very like the savins of New England. 
One bit of ground near Galisteo, for five miles or so, 
might be put bodily down by the Old Colony Railroad 
at Braintree, and the oldest inhabitant would never 
know a change had been made. Even the mountains 
look like Franconia and the Notch ; but still the 
patches of red earth cropping up here and there are 
like a continuation of Colorado. By the doors of 
wayside cabins, swarth groups of Mexicans, darker 
than mulattoes, the women and children with long, 
straight, black hair, lounge. We have gotten out of 
the work-a-day world into one of leisure. Every one 
looks lazy; there would be bustle enough in one 
street of the sleepiest Massachusetts village to drive 
this whole nation frantic. 

And here is Las Vegas — you see how the very 
names begin to grow soft and liquid — with its pretty 



64 ON THE WING. 

hotel, the Montezuma, a cross between the Pemberton 
and Nantasket. It is finished inside, with an eye for 
the ccsthetic that is keener than any we have met 
since leaving the Hub. The carpets are as nice a bit 
of color as one need crave ; and, from the patterns of 
the Kensington embroidered tidies, to the shape of 
the cups and saucers, all is as it should be. So is the 
service at table, and particularly grateful after the 
plate-hurlers of Manitou. There was a piano in the 
west parlor; a new baby Steinway, one of the love- 
liest instruments ever touched, and there we had one 
golden morning. When a violin has breathed into it, 
by some witchcraft of soul, such tenderness and 
weirdness and sweetness as draw one's spirit out with 
every tone that comes from it, and when a piano not 
only sustains but inspires it, what better gift of the 
gods can the world give us than to sit in the sunshine 
and listen. 

If you want to know the real luxury of a good 
wash, travel three thousand miles across the Conti- 
nent, be steeped in dust and smoke and ashes, live in 
a trunk and a sleeping-car, let your highest ambition 
be to keep your face and hands only decently dirtv, 
and then get into one of the warm sulphur-baths at 
Las Vegas, wath a neat handmaid to shampoo your 
tired head and make you clean, and neat, and whole- 
some. It is the most absolute revel in the world. 
You will understand, then, why Greek and Roman 
built baths of rare and costly marbles, and spent 
hours each day indulging in gentle dalliance with per- 
fumed waters. The popular belief in the country 



ON THE WING. 65 

round about, is that the baths will cure everything but 
consumption, and the atmosphere will cure that, so 
there is no chance of dying here, except by accident. 

We passed to-day in the Apache Canon, the scene 
of a celebrated battle between Mexicans and Con- 
federates during the late war, and the ruins of the 
earliest church even in this early colony; for we are 
now in an old, instead of a new, country. It knew a 
more ancient settlement than ours of the east. Here, 
nearly a hundred years before the Pilgrim Fathers 
stepped upon Plymouth rock, the stately Spanish 
cavaher, Alvar Nunez, led his company of knightly 
adventurers and Castilian soldiers through the sun- 
baked pla'ins in search of hidden treasure. And here 
long before, a nation of brave, gentle people lived and 
loved, leaving traces in tradition of laws, customs, and 
works which sometimes shame the boasted civilization 
of the present. 

Just as the sun was setting behind a dim line of 
distant mountains, we turned across the plain leading 
to Santa Fe, and saw the shining dome of the Jesuit's 
college, which is the most prominent building in the 
place, reflecting the long, level rays. Soon we were 
whirling through the wildest maze of tortuous unpaved 
streets, lost in whirlwinds of dust, crossing a shallow 
ford of running water in the middle of the highway, 
and enveloped from head to foot in a mysterious feel- 
ing that we have been mixed up with somebody else 
and are cases of mistaken identity. On the warm air, 
the Angclus is ringing from the church towers; dark- 
eyed, sad-looking women are gliding like shadows 



66 ON THE WING. 

under the long, white archways which line the street 
on each side ; dogs are barking in wild chorus ; 
soldiers lounging in the green plaza; a world of flat- 
roofed, blank-walled adobe houses, around and before 
us ; supper is waiting in the dining-room of the Palace 
Hotel, and we are in the city of the Holy Faith, with 
a feeling as if we w^ere cats in a strange garret. 

It is Sunday; in front of my window, a garden of 
perhaps three acres, surrounded by high walls of 
adobe, is divided into checker-like squares by raised 
banks of earth about two feet high, in order to keep 
the scarce, precious water on the beds when they are 
sprinkled. Faint little lines of green show themselves 
regularly through the baked-looking earth, where the 
very late early vegetables have started, but they are 
so faint that they scarcely disturb the deep, brown 
color. In one place a small patch of currant bushes 
are in full but rather thriftless condition. Along the 
side of the wide, dusty road, flat-roofed, one-story 
houses, all of adobe, still show straight, almost blank 
walls, only a heavy gate-like door here and there, or 
the closed wooden shutters of a window, breaking the 
monotony. 

These would seem to be the dreariest cf mortal 
dwelling-places, until you notice through one of the 
doors, which by chance has been left open, that the 
little houses are each built around an open square, 
with a court-yard in the centre, at least in the better 
class ; this is planted with trees, shrubbery or flowers, 
so that the inner life is better than the outer. A broad 
piazza is always in front, enclosed under heavy arches, 



ON THE WING. 67 

or supported by wooden posts, tlirovving the sidewalk 
into shadow, and making grateful protection from the 
sun. Up this covered sidewalk has just trotted a 
little donkey with two Mexicans on his back, their feet 
almost touching the uneven ground. Down the centre 
of the dusty road comes a sound of music, and three 
men with fiddles, playing an opera air, appear at the 
head of a sad little procession, bringing a dead baby 
to the grave. Four little dark-eyed bovs hold the bier 
on which rests, in a small open box lined with pink 
and covered with white lace and flowers, the tiny little 
waxen figure, while a man walking at the side, carries 
under his arm the ornamented pink cover which is 
soon to be fastened down forever. Behind comes a 
motley group : most of the women in black skirts, 
with the long, graceful, scarf-like shawl thrown over 
the head, which seems to be the national costume. 
One with a gay bonnet and American umbrella looks 
as out of place as the others would in a Boston street. 
Grotesque, almost ludicrous, some of our people find 
it, but, to me, unutterably toucliin^^^; for it seems as 
if the yearning hearts even in the first dismal pangs 
of grief are trying to express outwardly their firm 
trust that it is not cause for mourning, but joy, since 
"all is well with the child." Indeed, this is the belief 
which their Catholic church teaches, and it is beautiful 
as Faith and Hope can make it. Heaven grant the 
peace and consolation which conviction brings with it, 
to the weeping eyes following so longingly the little 
pink casket ! 

Now a couple of Pueblo Indians mounted on mus- 



68 ON THE WING. 

tangs dash down the place the h"ttle funeral procession 
has just left. Their rather gaudy rags and gewgaws 
float behind them; a couple of muskets swing loosely 
at the side; something is gleaming at each belt; they 
are talking rapidly with each other as they disap- 
pear in a cloud of dust around the nearest corner. 
Leaning against the adobe walls, groups of swarthy, 
dark-eyed men lounge or lie in the sun, smoking pipes 
or cigarettes; at one of the small square windows 
opening above their heads, a woman's face, with the 
sad, questioning look which belongs to the people, is. 
looking down. In the street, the shawl about the 
head is drawn forward and held with the left hand so 
as to cover the mouth entirely, leaving only the eyes 
visible. This alone is enough to give an oriental air 
to the place ; a long ruffled skirt of either some bright 
muslin, or black, like the shawl, completes the cos- 
tume. There is nothing distinctive about the men's 
dress, except the broad-brimmed, light-colored hat, 
which is universal. Just beyond the drowsy street, 
the gothic walls of the new cathedral, which is slowly 
being built about the half-ruined, centuries old, adobe 
building of the early missions, shows its buttresses 
and arched windows. Here and there, always between 
high clay walls, patches of verdure show a care- 
fully-tended bit of ground, while one large, shady 
spot, well covered with trees, marks the outline of 
Archbishop Almy's celebrated garden. In this, he 
has demonstrated, by the careful experimenting of 
many years, that almost every variety of vegetation, 
from the fruits and flowers of the North to the 



ON THE WING. 69 

tropical luxuriance of the South, can be grown in. 
Santa Fe, if irrigation is attended to properly. 

A soft .summer haze i.s over ever}thing; even the 
dogs are silent, and only the church bells break the 
stillness. Far away the faint, blue mountains rise 
mistily, piled like clouds, along the horizon; and all 
between, save for the few prominent cross-crowned 
church buildings, long, low walls of gray-brown or 
white adobe, make the flat earth look flatter, until it 
melts into the baked plains beyond. Every motion 
that meets the eye, except the two dashing Indians, is 
lazy and languid, as if hurry had gone out of the 
world. Pictures of that indolent dolce far niente, 
loafers couched in perfect bliss, are all about, but 
they do not look like the seedy beats of our Northern 
experience; they appear to have a certain right to be 
lazy. Even the team of twelve oxen crossing the 
Plaza looks like a bit of still life. It seems out of 
place to be talking and thinking in English. The 
soft, musical Spanish, with its graceful gesture and 
liquid flow, is more in keeping with the earth we are 
in now ; American nasals require too much exertion. 

One evening, before leaving the city, we were taken, 
through the kindness of one of the American resi- 
dents, to see a Mexican dance. The walk through 
the dark, crooked streets, stumbling, in utter silence, 
over still darker sidev/alks under the deep arches, was 
so wierd and ghost-like, that it made odd preparation, 
for a festival scene. The primitive ball, which was a 
weekly occurrence, w^as held in the one long, low 
room of an adobe house, which was entered through. 



70 ON THE WING. 

the chamber of the master and mistress. A single 
board around the room for seats, a table in the centre 
of one side, upon which sat three dark-skinned, 
wrinkled fiddlers, some tallow candles in tin fasten- 
ings high on the walls, and a small counter at one 
end, made up the furnishing of the place. On one 
side the men, on the other the women, sat motionless 
and voiceless. We, from fear of infringing on the 
etiquette of the place, were profoundly silent also, so 
that a gathering of deaf mutes could not be quieter. 
At last a short, svvarth man, rising, crossed the room, 
offered his arm to a partner, and still without a word, 
took his place upon the floor ; three others followed 
his example, so that a set was formed almost in the 
position of our quadrilles ; the fiddlers struck up an 
odd but well-timed waltz, and the dancers began a 
graceful rythmic movement, with so much ease and 
such just conception of tlie swaying measure, as was 
surprising. When we remembered the distorted steps 
we had often seen danced to the much-abused waltz; 
at home, it was refreshing to see all the performers 
moving with such delicious languor in slow circles, as 
if the very spirit of the music were pulsing through 
them. There were many pretty figures, always timed 
to the same swaying step, and always performed with 
the same gentle gravity. The women, except for 
their lovely, dark Spanish eyes, were decidedly homel)', 
the men little better ; but one beautiful Madonna-faced 
creature showed what the type could be when it 
reached perfection. Tlie dances all resembled each 
other, and, in the intervals, refreshments, in the shape 



ON THE WINC;. 



71 



of soda and sarsaparilla- waters, with glass dishes of 
bright-colored bonbons, were handed around. We 
were treated with great kindness, and were much im- 
pressed with the quiet dignity and grace of the people, 
which seemed so unlike the noisy hilarity of a similar 
meeting at home. It was in keeping with the slow, 
quiet, grave world around us. 

We had at Wallace, three hours after leaving Santa 
Fe, our first real introduction to the Indians. They 
crowded the hotel and railroad platforms, offering 
small lots of very poor turquoise and native pottery 
for sale. They always asked three times as much as 
they intended to take, and would sell the tin bracelets 
on their very dirty arms, or the silver rings in their 
very dirty ears, for one or two of the " bits " they 
coveted so much. I am not sure that they would not 
have sold themselves and their children if the price 
was high enough. They were a sharp blow to any 
preconceived idea of Indian nobility, the features, 
without being particularly bad, were so wanting in 
any sort of animation ; the petty pride in a paint- 
streaked face or a gaudy necklace so apparent ; the 
dirt so hideous, both of themselves and their filthy, 
faded blankets, that one involuntarily- shrank from 
contact. But they had good eyes, good teeth, figures 
erect as a young sapling, and, where they followed the 
traditional costume of their race, a certain pic- 
turesqueness not yet quite destroyed. You could 
conceive that there might be among them some young 
chief worthy to be the friend of Deer Slayer. But as 
soon as they attempted Christian habiliments and dis- 



72 ON THE WING. 

guised themselves in shop-made coats and trousers, 
the repulsiveness of their dirty personnel was so 
exaggerated, that it overcame everything else. You 
were disgusted, and nothing more. Their chief was 
a much superior specimen to most of his tribe. 

We were in a very perturbed state of mind all that 
night, from some accounts we had heard of danger 
from the Navajos farther on, and of the dread of the 
people of Wallace even of these Pueblos. Their 
mild stolidity might be only a cloak for some fiendish 
plot ; and when you are in the midst of a country 
which is credited with being in a state of uprising, 
vour nerves toward evening are just in a condition to 
be worked ; so, though common sense in the still 
.small voice of conscience declared the whole thing 
impossible, we persisted in imagining a war-whoop in 
every steam-whistle, a night attack in every sudden 
stop, and instant annihilation lurking in every shadow. 
But we woke with our scalps on. 

El Paso, looked from the cars like another Santa 
Fe, only more caked and baked, if possible, with 
mountains like dirt-heaps in the distance. We were 
all somewhat out of sorts after the sleepless night 
and dreadfully hot morning which followed it, and 
the clouds of flying dust and lifeless adobe houses 
made us still more hippish. But the ride across into 
old Mexico, in spite of dust, in spite of heat, in spite 
of bad temper, was one of the most interesting of our 
lives. Once you had gotten across the rope ferry 
over the Rio Grande, 3'ou were in a bit of Moorish 
Spain. Before and around you constantly, are narrow^ 



ON THE WING. 73 

dusty streets, bordered by low adobe walls, with an 
occasional heavy door opening into an inner court- 
yard, bright with tall, blossoming oleanders, rising 
from amid green shrubbery around a tinkling foun- 
tain. Brown-skinned, bare-armed and bare -legged 
figures, in short turic and drawers of white linen, 
work among the vines in vine}"ards surrounded by 
high, hot walls; a train of Mexican supply wagons, 
blue-bodied and white-capped, shining in the brilliant 
sunshine, each drawn by twelve burros, with bells on 
their bridles, driven four abreast by a cloud of broad- 
hatted, broad-sashed muleteers, comes up some narrow 
lane. We drove along a shady road, arched with 
cottonwoods and blossoming locusts ; a swift-flowing 
canal ran at one side ; on the other, a hedge of tall- 
spiked cactus, each prickly rod tipped with one flaming 
blossom of glowing scarlet, like Joseph's rod, which 
blossomed at the top. Fields of purple alfalfa, bearded 
barley, swaying wheat, acre after acre of vineyard, 
stretched on either hand, divided by hedges of osage 
orange, or adobe walls surmounted by the flat prairie 
cactus we had seen before. A brown, WTinkled hag, 
kneeling on the red earth under a mesquite bush by 
the side of a small pool, polished a bright brass kettle, 
w^hich glowed like some sacred vessel in the service of 
the Sun God. A train of small burros came winding 
down one of the crooked streets be-tween high walls of 
adobe, each with two tiny, half-naked, black imps on 
its shaggy back. Aross a field came a shapely young 
woman, her bright, dark eyes intensified by a white 
scarf thrown over the brow, balancing on her head a 



74 ON THE WING. 

great earthern jar of water, while two little boys at 
her side trotted contentedly on, each bearing two 
pails hanging from a primitive yoke resting on the 
shoulders. Behind the wooden bars of a grated 
window a group of bronzed baby faces looked gravely 
out ; under an archway the glowing white walls of a 
court-yard showed itself, a hand's-breadth of blue 
sky shining above. Once a young girl, with a bril- 
liant, dark face, held up a glorious bunch of deep-red 
roses as we drove past, and, running after the car- 
riage, shyly placed them in my hands, and ran laughing 
back to the shelter of the placita. 

So it was endlessly : it was the novelty of Santa 
Fe intensified tenfold, with a greater compliment of 
beauty than Santa Fe ever possessed. One wanted 
to go in and stay for awhile with the grave, courteous, 
brown people in the drowsy shade of the arches lead- 
ing into some quiet placita, with the Angelus bells 
coming in pulsing waves of soft sound through the 
sultry air. It seemed as if here, at least, care should 
sleep, and the bristling, bustling tumult of life lose 
itself in the dolce far niente of summer restfulness. 
Fade far away, dreams of ambition ! Melt into thin, 
blue air, like the smoke curling slenderly from yon 
adobe chimney; what has perplexity, or longing, or 
vain desire, or vainer effort, to do with this Land of 
the Lotus ? What is life but the calm of passionless 
content, and the culmination — the apotheosis — of 
laziness ! And what are we but disembodied spirits, 
floating in a languid atmosphere of luxurious content, 
at peace with ourselves and the world ! 



ON FHE WING. 



75 



There was an irresistible fascination over every- 
thing. The Scriptural-looking flat roofs, surrounded 
by a low parapet, as if the inhabitants were in the 
habit of using them for summer bed-rooms, did more 
than any one other feature to give an absolutely 
foreign air. Men plowing in high-v/alled fields, used 
a plow made of a pointed piece of wood, fitted v/ith 
handles, and drove their oxen by a long thong of hide 
fastened to the horns. Existence here was under the 
most primitive conditions. Perhaps if one could stay 
longer, so as to know them w^ell, this small, slight 
people might develop an activity Vv^hich would change 
our first impression ; but, so far, the almond-e^-ed 
Chinese, coming in felt shoes and blue pjahma down, 
the long arcade on the sunny side of the street, looks 
the embodiment of purpose and business, compared 
with the Mexicans before and after him. Business, 
if it is not a mistake to speak of business in connec- 
tion with affairs here, is conducted in the easiest 
way ; the ferry crossing the Rio Grande is a flat-boat, 
with two ropes at the sides, fastened to pulleys, which 
run over a cable stretched from bank to bank. The 
tremendously swift current swings it across ; a couple 
of men v/ith a windlass guide it ; it moves somewhat 
cumbrously and very slowl)^ while those on the bank 
stand fretting and fuming, waiting their turn. A 
bridge across the narrow stream w^ould do ten times 
the work, or a boat with proper machinery, but this is 
probably why it is n't in use. It would be the entering 
wedge toward hurrying up, and your true Mexican 
never hurries. Indeed, he has pretty fairly inoculated 



76 ON THE WING. 

his American fellow-citizen : they have never quite 
become satisfied with the railroad. 

I wonder liow many of our young people would like 
to go housekeeping in one of those adobe houses. 
There is one incalculable blessing, — no stairs. If 
you want to climb on top of the flat roof over the 
single story, you must take a ladder. Through the 
door, in the blank clay wall which fronts the street, a 
narrow, dark passage, usually whitewashed, leads to 
the placita, or square central court-yard, on which all 
the rooms open. The parlor has a print or two on 
the walls, probably, and a rug or two on the bare, 
clean, scrubbed floor; possibly, a table with a few 
books, a couple of wicker-chairs, and a white muslin 
curtain at the little window. There may be a bowl of 
Pueblo pottery or a brilliantly-dyed Indian blanket, or 
a sewing-machine in a corner, but this is unusual and 
superfluous luxury. The dining-room has its round 
table and a few simple chairs; the kitchen, its fire- 
place and mesa ; the bedrooms, dark and cool, their 
small, single, white beds, and nothing else. It is not 
overwhelming, but it is enough ; and their house- 
keepers do not die of nervous prostration. 

The system of irrigation is very simple, but exten- 
sive. Earthen ditches conduct the water from tlie 
river, from mountain springs, or from artificial reser- 
voirs, through the fields, crossing the roads by means 
of small wooden conduits, which make abrupt, jerky 
elevations every few hundred feet. By damming the 
flow of water at one point, it can be turned into any 
desired channel, so that every field, no matter how 



ox THE V/INC. yy 

larp^e, is comi^letely under control. They pretend that 
it is a much safer plan than that of depending on 
natural means ; but, for myself, I believe tlie rain is 
the better watering-pot. 

This was all on the Mexican side, in El Paso del 
Norte, where the three-barred Mexican flag which 
should have floated on its tall staff, but did not, pro- 
claimed that we were indeed and truth in a strange 
land. Of El Paso itself, the Texan city, we have the 
most unpleasant memories of the trip thus far. The 
day was insufferably hot; we were not prepared for it; 
the streets were a foot deep in powdery dust, which 
choked unmercifully ; we were still lurkingly and 
secretly afraid of the Indians and cowboys, about 
whom dreadful people were constantly dropping hints 
and innuendoes ; we were half sick and wholly tired 
from the unwonted temperature ; iced lemonade was 
twenty-five cents a glass and oranges four for a dollar, 
so the bitter cup v/as full. There is no. balm in the 
Gilead of travelling which vv'ill heal so many ills at 
once. 

But that bit of Mexico, that oasis which only the 
rushing, shining river separated from the dust desert 
of Texas, with its green groves of locust and cotton- 
wood, its hedges of cactus and mesquite, its bushes 
of wild roses, its wavy, delicate greenery ! It v/as all 
Morocco. It was only necessary to replace the broad 
sombrero with the Moslem fez, and pile the contents 
of the wagons on the backs of a caravan cf camels. 
All sorts of Scriptural and oriental pictures came to 
one's mind: the bits of blue sky glowing between 



^8 ON THE WING. 

naked white or brown walls ; the bare-armed laborers 
in loose, white jacket and short trousers ; the long, 
jingling lines of mules and donkeys creeping lazily up 
narrow, sleepy lanes ; even tlie lustrous eyes and 
teeth, and the frequent bit of bright or white drapery, 
kept up the illusion. The children were the hand- 
somest race 1 ever saw in my life, and the straight, 
lithe riders, doffing hats as they passed in token of 
salutation, had a graceful deference which even their 
haughty brothers of the East could not surpass. The 
odds for effectiveness and picturesquencss would of 
course be in favor of the Bedouin, with his flowing 
mantle and Arab steed ; but somehow or other, though 
there is nothing in life less dignified than a mule, 
a Mexican can manage to preserve the illusion of 
dignity even with this long- eared animal as his 
accessory. 

The soft-flowing Spanish names of this part of the 
world are another source of novelty to our English 
ears, grating yet with the harsh usage they received 
in Kansas and the middle West. How can Alamosa, 
Antonita, Fra Cristobal, San Diego and \^alverde be 
anything but lovely? Is a backyard any longer a 
backyard when it is a placita.'' isn't a vulgar shop 
removed from all suspicion of vulgarity when it is 
changed to la tienda ? and ought not all tables to be 
made of ormolu or buhl when they become mesas .'' 
But in spite of even this fine bit of sentiment, we were 
all heartily glad to start again on our journey, and see 
fade behind us into the grey desert from which it had 
risen the wall of the house in El Paso, with its twenty- 



ON THE WING. 



79 



five bullet marks, where four desperadoes had emptied 
their revolvers at the sheriff trying to capture them; 
and the more sinister marks on the door-post across 
the street where the sheriff in turn had killed three of 
the men while trying to seize a fourth. Such are the 
legends that hang like clouds yet, around the rising 
star of the West. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 

THE best specimen we have seen yet of the 
traditional Westerner, the man whom Bret 
Harte created and the world has taken as a 
type, fearless, dashing, yet gentle, was the sheriff of 
Santa Fe, who travelled with us for a short time on 
his way to Missouri to pick up -some criminals. He 
had killed in the course of his different terms of ser- 
vice, and purely as a matter of business, ten men, and 
was reported to be as absolutely unconcerned in the 
face of danger as Billy the Kid, a desperado who, 
before he was shot at the age of twenty, had killed 
twenty-eight men. Tony carried in his belt a revolver 
belonging to this same Billy, and took a modest pride 
in showing it and giving its bloody record. He was a 
handsome fellow, tall, straight, with fine teeth and 
large dark eyes, and a shy, awkward smile, which 
made him look more hke an innocent countryman out 
on a holiday, than the reckless, cool, dare-devil he 
was. He showered a handful of garnets on one of 
the young people, as if they were common stones, 
just as an emperor flings diamonds at Patti, and car- 
ried a httle package of pretty things to an only sister 
he was to see on his way, as tenderly as any kind, 
common-place brother might. He spoke of the In- 



82 ON THE WING. 

dians in terms of sucli absolute and undisguised 
contempt, that we gave the remnants of our fears to 
the winds, and were honestly sorry when the big, brave, 
gentle barbarian took his leave at Albuquerque. 

Nothing can be more desolately dreadful than the 
alkali plains of Arizona, unless it be those of Cah- 
fornia farther on. The poor, sparse vegetation is cov- 
ered with the same gray dust, so that it looks like 
the ghastly form of hfe with the spirit departed, as 
one imagines the pallid trees and shadowy shrubs of 
Dante's inferno. It is a world that might be inhabited 
by disembodied spirits, whose hopeless eyes wandered 
aimlessly amid the ghosts of remembered things. 
The saddest of all sad places ! Even the mountains, 
instead of the titanic spurs and slopes which make 
New Mexico and Colorado beautiful, were only giant 
dust heaps, tumbled in inextricable confusion, lovely 
still, though, with a vague, undefined outline, far-off 
against the sky. The air had begun to grow more 
hazy ; the sky was a paler blue ; the enormous cacti, 
which look always as if they belonged to some past 
age of the world, and should have gone out forever 
with the ichthyosaurus and megetharium, lifted their 
uncouth ugliness into painful prominence. It is the 
most unlovely vegetable creation on earth : fleshly, 
prickly, horrible in its stolid, brutal obstinacy; even 
its gorgeous flowers do not lessen its repulsiveness. 
You are filled with wonder to see so fair a blossom on 
so foul a stem ; but that is all : you do not love the 
stinging monster that bears it any the more. Covered 
with the shining dust of the plains, so that they seem 



ON THE WING. 83 

to spring like abortions of the earth itself, they are 
more than ever repulsive. I hate the cactus : it looks 
like the reptile of the vegetable world. 

At times one comes upon a perfectly level plain like 
a white sea, absolutely unrelieved by anything beyond 
billows of sand stretching to the dim mountains on 
either hand. At other times, masses of the most 
wonderful flowers, great ox-eyed daisies, golden core- 
opsis, fine purple verbena, and a lily-shaped, velvety 
flower of deep, solid yellow, grew in clusters that 
would make a city forester wild with envy. We filled 
the car with stacks of these at each stopping-place, 
only too glad of some relief from the dreadful, gray 
monotony outside. In the very midst of all this, on 
what is called the Sulphur Plains, the most beautiful 
mirage came and lasted for hours. From a blue sea 
the mountains rose, their purple peaks reflected to 
perfection in the clear water; while isolated masses, 
brown and yellow, full of chrome and umber shadows 
like the rocks at Nantasket, lifted themselves between. 
I never dreamed before of such an illusion. One 
could wonder no longer after this at the hallucination 
which tempts caravans and wayworn travellers miles 
out of their way, luring them to death and destruc- 
tion, to reach the shining waters gleaming so placidly 
beyond. 

At Fort Yuma we met another tribe of Indians, 
better made, physically, than the Pueblos, taller of 
stature, more symmetrical, and, except for the hair, a 
shade less dirty. One fellow, with a leonine mane, 
massive head, and finely marked features, had a 



84 ON THE WING. 

grotesque resemblance to Rubenstein, especially when 
striding across the platform at the depot to offer a 
wicker-basket full of live quail for sale, he tossed back 
his long locks with a fine fling of the head. The 
people seemed aware of their natural advantages and 
inclined to display them as much as possible ; so that 
while the Pueblo women covered even the ankles with 
close wrappings, and held their greasy blankets high 
around the neck, the matrons of Yuma folded one 
long piece of brilliant calico straightly around the 
body, and that was all. It was usually passed under 
the arms, but sometimes covered one shoulder. Most 
of the braves, wore one striped garment like an under- 
vest, and disdained to fret their proud limbs by any 
other unnecessary muffling. Some of our people 
looked askance at Hrst, and one dear old lady, tugging 
at my dress, exclaimed, " Why can V they make those 
awful creatures put on more clothes?" But they 
•decided at last that this severe simplicity of attire 
was one of the monstrous productions of the country, 
like the cactus and the sand-plains, and so must be 
tolerated. 

The current of the Colorado, like that of most 
rivers we had passed lately, was exceedingly swift, 
and the water, probably on that account, muddy. 
Still the effect, except when looking directly down, 
was blue and brilliant, full of dancing lights and 
pretty, sparkling eddies, which foamed at the foot of 
the tall cliffs bounding the sides. 

Almost immediately after leaving Yuma, we plunged 
into the desert again. Inexpressibly dreary ; the dead 



ON THE WING. 85 

plain, the tufted pine-apple plants, the gray cactus, the 
iikeleton bushes ; and always the dim outline of the 
mountains on either hand, like giant thunder-clouds, 
adding their wrathful, brooding silence to the sullen 
scene. It might be Sahara instead of California; yon 
far-away moving speck a train of dromedaries, with 
caftaned, slow-pacing Musselmans by their sides ; that 
tufted palm the edge of an oasis. And here, praised 
ba the Fates ! 1 y the brink cf a muddy water-course, 
his humped back elevated in a broken arch against 
the sky, his patient neck bowed abjectly as he lifts 
it to look at the passing train, is a camel: a real, 
truly, dust-colored camel! When our picturesque 
3-oung man, with a bright-colored turban wound around 
his dusty locks, a Navajo scarf girdling his somewhat 
slender waist, opens the door and shouts, "Algiers! 
ten minutes for sherbet and pillauf ! " we all smile 
absently, as if it might have been, even if it is not. 

Suddenly, almost without warning, we have left the 
wastes of sand behind, and are whirling between foot- 
hills, low and green, almost hemming in the track; 
the great shadowy mountains, still as grim and dusty 
as ever, stretch beyond- but between us and them 
.such lovely, smiling valleys, such fields of waving 
grain, such yellow sweeps of wild ftiustard, such an 
infinitely beautiful variation of changeful, harmonious 
colors ! Now and again a sparkling stream of clear, 
running water; a pretty, small house, with its kitchen 
gardens stretching in order around the porch ; the 
spire of a tiny village church ; a camp of Chinese 
laborers srathered into a circle of small white tents.. 



86 ON THE WING. 

The change is so instantaneous that you wait, watch- 
ing for the desert to return again. But no ; the lovely, 
smiling land only broadens and brightens; vineyards 
<:ome, and meadows of purple alfalfa ; the dooryards 
of isolated cottages are glowing with enormous ole- 
anders and spikes of tall white lilies ; a man walking 
on the track, with his hands full of branches of snow- 
ball, tosses them into the car windows as if they were 
ttie commonest things in life. And this within half 
an hour, after having passed two long, ghostly days 
hemmed in by the awful desolation of the gray desert,, 
with nor sight nor sound of life save at meal-stations 
and water-tanks ! It is better than the grand trans- 
formation scene in a Christmas pantomime. 

It seems quite natural to feast at dinner-time on 
.spring chickens and fresh peas, with a bouquet of 
flowers by each plate; it would seem natural if the 
restaurant-waiters floated out in gauzy skirts to the 
sound of soft music to attend us. Can this exquisite, 
perfumed land be the same, by any law of God or 
nature, as the dark and direful place through which 
we were journeying before ? 

Back again come the old landmarks of civilization, 
the patent plows and harrows, the thrifty, home- 
like look of neatness about dooryard and well-sweep. 
In broad fields, husbandmen are already harvesting 
some of their crops, while others are just beginning 
to spring into the sunshine. Strange-leaved trees, 
the deep slaty-blue of the eucalyptus, the generous, 
large-armed shade of the walnut, the gigantic, deeply- 
scalloped foliage of the fig, come now and again to 



ON THE WING. 87 

Vciry the landscape. The wayside grass grows tall 
and thick, headed like bearded barley ; the flowers are 
larger; climbing roses festoon the entire fronts of 
the little houses, and tangled white honeysuckles rise 
like trees into the air. There, a hedge of callas lifts 
itself statelily six feet above the garden border; here, 
a one-story cottage is covered to the eaves with trail- 
in": smilax. We are in constant bewilderment and 
ecstasy, until, just as the sun is setting behind the old 
belfry of the ancient mission-church of San Gabriel, 
and the evening star we have seen so often is rising 
with the pale silver bow of the newest of all new moons 
by its side, a breath of fragrance unknown before, 
an impalpable, fine essence, as of something we have 
known in dreams, floats across the still air, and we 
know that at last — at last— we have come into the 
promised kingdom, and are flying through the orange 
groves of the Land of Flowers. 

When we rode out next day from Los Angeles to 
the Mission, and, after passing miles of spicy avenues, 
stretching right and left in long diverging lines o£ 
glossy, dark-leaved trees, white with blossoms on the 
outer edges, and heavy with red-gold clusters of fruit 
within, turned into the lane leading to Sierra Madre 
Villa, it was too utterly beautiful for anything but 
fairyland. A beauty as different from that of P.Ianitou 
as can well be imagined ; warm, voluptuous, languish- 
ing beauty ; air faint with odors of millions of sleepy 
flowers ; a bewilderment of bloom and brightness ; a 
veritable, wild garden, with everything from a timid 
New England pink or English violet to the passionate 



88 ON THE WING. 

depth of a forest of jacqueminots, or the stately, 
Juno-hke waxiness of. a catalpa. Such a riotous 
Avealth of bloom and fragrance, as if Nature had gone 
on a revel, and, tipsy with delight, had spun into 
odorous masses of color and light every whim that 
crossed her vagabond fancy ! Century plants had 
truncated columns tnirty feet high in the centre; 
Marechal Neils and Gold of Ophir roses, blazing scar- 
let pomegranate tips, slender Eastern palms with tall, 
swaying, fan-like leaves, tangled themselves in a 
labyrinth of beauty at every step; and behind, loom- 
ing like the shadow of some great veiled fate, the 
waiting mountains rose, half hidden by the misty 
blue air. 

We drove through the most extensive orange groves 
and vineyards of the region, and were royally treated. 
I wonder whether oranges ever again will taste so 
sweet as those great luscious globes ; I know they 
never will, foi wnile we were eating them there was 
the wonaertul, half-known world about us, with all its 
witchery. Even if I had them at home, 

" I could not bring back the sea and the sky — 
It sang to the ear; tliey sang to the eye," 

as Emerson says in one of his loveliest poems. 

We are lodged in the dearest and quietest little 
house. You pass from the big, bustling, crowded 
liotel, through a long corridor into a sunny back street; 
30U climb a flight of steep, steep steps set in the face 
of a wall thirty feet high ; you pass under an arch- 
way of cypress into a bit cf garden, v.ith heliotrope 
bushes higher than )our liead, banks cf geraniums, 



ON THE WING. 89 

beds of cactus, hedges of roses and jessamine, and 
there you find a little atom of a house, with bay- 
windows jutting into the flower.y wilderness, cool and 
shady and altogether delightful. A small bit of para- 
dise ; still you know the serpent entered even there, 
so it is not out of the way that we should have private 
grievance. But worlds would not buy me to mention 
what. 

After a week of Los Angeles, it resolves itself into 
a sort of hybrid town, with no absolutely distinct point 
about it, except the always wonderful flowers. In the 
Spanish quarter, the old adobe houses lose their in- 
dividuality by having sloping, instead of fiat, roofs, 
and the broad streets take entirely away the hot, tropi- 
cal <iffect, which the sun-dried walls had in El Paso 
and Santa F6. They look here more like common, 
small tenement blocks, not dirty enough to be pic- 
turesque, nor clean enough to be decent. The chil- 
dren are not so pretty, and the women more slovenly 
than those we saw before ; still, with many lovely 
faces, the soft, dark eyes always brilliantly beautiful, 
with a clear olive tint, and a fine oval in the outline. 
The color in a large majority of the people, however, 
is quite as black as most negroes ; and the contrast 
between the fineness of the sharp, rather thin features, 
and decidedly ebon skin, is most marked. 

In the main streets, filled with a very Eastern bustle 
of traffic, the florid style of architecture, adorned with 
a flimsy Western efliorescence of jig-sawing, and fre- 
quently recurring balconies on the second story, give 
a mongrel aspect to the otherwise home-like street. 



90 ON THE WING. 

The stores are large and spacious, witli whatever we 
have been accustomed to look upon as necessary to 
comfort and well baing in their broad wdndows ; but 
with now and then a bit of something strange to make 
one realize the four thousand miles between us and the 
sacred intricacies of the dear home city. Outside the 
meat shops, hang on lines, thin, long strips of wdiat 
appears to be untanned leather, but is in reality 
jerked beef drying in the sun. If the whirlwind of 
flies gathered about do not take it bodily away it 
will probably appear again on some of our Boston 
tea tables next winter. Against the doors of vegetable 
markets, huge strings of dried peppers, red and hot, 
appeal to the quick Spanish temper, as red and hot as 
themselves. Festoons of the same lurid vegetable 
line the walls of every fruit store, while the broad 
plank sidewalks are covered with cartloads of Northern 
and Southern fruits. The very finest cherries we ever 
saw were in profusion, but dear, while lemons and 
oranges of regal size went begging. Artichokes and 
cauliflowers seemed to grow on every bush, and there 
was no limit to the quantity or variety of vegetables 
of all kinds. At the principal stores the contents 
appeared to have been turned inside out, so much 
was piled outside, while wagons with country produce 
stood on street corners. One small, rather shabby, 
cross tow^n, New York horse car, ambled through the 
middle of the main street, but the people seemed 
averse to it, or to the ten-cent fare, and we never saw 
many avail themselves of the privilege. 

Sometimes in crossing from one principal thorough- 



ON THE WING. 



9^ 



fare to another, instead of a side street there would be 
a flight of steps and a series of long corridors opening- 
on cool court-yards, with splashing fountains in the 
centre, and tall calla lilies looking at themselves in a 
circle round the quiet, shadowy basin. It was in this 
way that we stumbled once upon the Public Library,, 
with a pleasant reading-room and well-filled shelves. 
We found some illustrated books on Colorado and 
California, surveys and travel over the very places we 
had just come across, which seemed like a panorama cf 
our whole journey. Except by some members of our 
own party, it did not seem to be as well patronized as 
it deserved ; but perhaps this is not the literary seasoa 
in California. 

Down or up the side streets, the dearest little white 
houses, tiny as children's playthings, made to look 
like mansions with towers, and bay windows, and 
what not, stood each in its own little garden, com- 
pletely covered with creeping and clinging vines. The 
people are particularly partial to tall cypresses, cut and 
trimmed in purely conventional forms into great cones, 
or round flower pots, or square cubes, — the most 
stilted, unnatural, depressing trees I ever looked at. 
These are molded into archways, and set in every con- 
ceivable spot on the tiny lawns, almost grotesquely 
disproportioned to the size. Why they should choose^ 
among the many lovely and gracious forms which so 
crowd this bright world, such a contracted, dyspeptic^ 
funereal form of vegetation, only the law of contraries 
can answer. Every house has its porch, large or 
small, where the family sit and work during the long^ 



92 ON THE WING. 

pleasant afternoons, under a tangle of sweet honey- 
suckles and great white roses, that clamber and twist 
and leap, like lovers trying to reach their ladies' lat- 
tices. And always the strong, sweet perfume of the 
orana;e sroves — for lemon blossoms are scentless — 
coming and going on the warm air, and making one 
desire that all senses might be merged in one, with 
the nose of an ancient Roman through which to ex- 
ercise it. Simply to breathe that indescribable, deli- 
cious, balmly air was happiness-, i, was enough to 
make the city, as its beautiful name implies, of the 
Angels. 

Down in the Chinese section, which looked as drear}- 
as the spot devoted to social pariahs of any country 
must, we walked once toward evening, and inv^ested 
some loose change in a little shop covered with hiero- 
glyphics, and stuffed with barbaric trifles. Very little 
that was new to our blase eyes after Zinn's Parlors; 
the same crepe monsters for pincushions, the same in- 
evitable fans and umbrellas and embroidered silks 
and carved ivories, but not, I am sorry to say, the 
same modest}^ in regard to prices. One could afford 
to pay something extra, however, for buying from a 
real John Chinaman with a gorgeous pigtail, a set 
of the most perfect teeth ever given a human, and a 
most decided opinion on the crooked mazes of Ameri- 
can politics. He mildly but decidedly repelled our 
sj-mpathy on the veto question, and declared that " the 
S'p'eme Court of United States do p'otect yights of 
eve'y citizen ; " and when we ventured to remark that 
this was the very head and front of their offending, in 



ON THE WIN- 



93 



that his people did not become citizens, but made their 
money licre and took it home to the Flowery Land ta 
spend, he gaye us a look of pitying contempt from his 
slantins: Chinese eyes and shook his bald head. He 
pressed upon us \yith energ)', as much energy as a 
Celestial cart manage to devote to earthly things, some 
little cabalistic boxes of "pent for ladies; yer goot; 
red — vite"' — \yhich we finally made out to be a yery 
fine form of rice-powder of home manufacture, and 
presumably pure. Judging from the city streets, they 
must haye found a tremendous market for this in Los 
Angeles, for nearly eyery white women we met was 
plastered unmercifully with rouge and pearl powder. 
This appears to be a trait among all southern nations. 
We visited, with a special note of introduction, one 
of the ver}' largest orange groves within the city limits^ 
where over a hundred acres were taken up with fine^ 
thrifty trees, and warehouses for packing fruit. The 
proprietor's house, a one-story, flat-roofed adobe build- 
ing, with immensely broad, white piazzas, set in a 
pretty, prim flower garden, and running at the back 
around three sides of an inner placita, was charmingly 
cool ?.rd quiet; a grand piano, with violin and guitar 
cases near it, and a pile of music on a small table 
near the door, made the deep-windowed parlor in- 
viting. A bevy of dear little bright-eyed, deep-tinted 
children, who were tumbling and playing in true baby 
freedom among the flowers, and racing up and down 
the long verandas, brought back certain groups around 
the little house at Green Hill that turned me heart- 
sick for just a moment. A pleasant, woody smell and 



94 



ON THE WING. 



hammering close by led us to a cooper's shop, where 
the boxes \,are being made to transport pi-les of fruit, 
gathered from the gieat orchards beyond, and con- 
stantly replenished from loaded wagons. A large 
farm-house at cider-making has something of the same 
liberality about it ; only that apples, for all their ruddy 
and russet skins, can never have the opulent tropical 
glow of these huge, luscious spheres. In the midst 
of his men the master stood, picking and packing 
with the rest, his handsome, dark head and patriarchal 
beard strikingly like the Apostle Paul in Raphael's 
St. Cecilia. The long, stately rows of trees, rounded 
and beautiful, for an orange-tree is one cf the most 
symmetrical in the whole fauna, stretched far into the 
distance, and one drove for hours through perfumed, 
shady avenues, in a half drowsy state of bliss, which 
resembled semi-intoxication. The lavish kind-hearted- 
ness of the people crowded us with stacks of flowers 
and heaps of choice fruit wherever we went, so that 
our rooms at the hotel looked more like a floral holiday 
than an every-day world. 

Every quarter of the globe appears to be repre- 
sented in this strangely populated city, but principally 
Mexico and Ireland. There was evidence of this in 
the cathedral where we heard mass ; the priest making 
his announcements first in liquid Spanish and after- 
wards in a pure, sweet Irish brogue. In the day- 
school of the Sisters of Charity, more than twenty 
countries were represented, and the contrast of black, 
white and yellow faces was extremely curious. The 
gentle but firm rule of these admirable teachers, 



ON THE WING. 



95 



showed to advantage in the good results obtained 
from such mixed conditions. The children seemed 
very happy, and sang one or two English school songs 
with pleasant effect. The house is set in an orange- 
grove, with a wilderness of flowers immediately about 
it. A species of gorgeous red lily, glowing in royal 
clusters of six and eight, on top of each tall stem, the 
like of which no one had ever seen before, grew here 
in profusion, and we came home laden with treasures. 

I can hardly fancy any one rising to subhmcly great 
things in this soft, seducing atmosphere. One needs 
more of sting and sharpness from whicli to work out 
the fruits of adversity. But on a calm, sunny day, 
when the Coast Range is showing like Luminous blue 
shadow at the end of the main street, and the nearer 
foot-hills are glowing softly in green and gold, when 
the air is redolent with perfume and nature garlanded 
with flowers, O, if one had only every one she loved 
about her, how happy she could be in Los Angeles ! 

Part of an hour by rail takes one to Santa Monica, 
the Nantasket of Southern California, if 30U can 
imagine Nantasket devoid of hurry and bustle and 
fun, sobered by the beautiful shadow of the mountain, 
changed by the ultra-marine color of the water, and 
full always of a thunder of surf which breaks with a 
strong under-tow over the beach. A lovely old garden 
near by has the finest specimens of geraniums our 
people had seen yet, and store galore of such jessamine 
and pomegranites as can only be met here. It was 
in another garden, old, too, and exquisite with the 
wild, willful grace which only time lends to flowers, 



^6 ON THE WING. 

that we found fig-trees with the nearly ripe fruit hang- 
ing under broad leaves, and small olives just beginning 
to form. We found mineral water there also, health- 
ful and horrible, so that the beautiful country evidently 
has another element of future greatness upon which 
to fall back. 

Through the principal streets, wide and unpaved, 
the country people come driving with a team of stout 
horses, and a strong beach wagon well fdled with 
buxom wife and troop of healthy children. The 
women drive as well as the men, with a dash that 
seems to belong to the Western climate. All the 
trading of the surrounding country is done here, 
which accounts in part for the immense number of 
stores of every kind in proportion to the houses. The 
Chinese have, along with their legitimate occupation 
of washing, taken up that of market gardening, and 
bring, in hand -carts and small wagons, the early 
vegetables used by the town people. There is no 
form or variety of these which does not grow to 
perfection. Cauliflowers and artichokes, which are 
dainties to us, as well as the entire list of early spring 
produce, are piled upon the sidewalks or packed in 
the small open stores until they are common as 
potatoes. It looks a little oddly to see the chamber- 
maid with a queue and pair of linen pantaloons, or to 
hear the cooks chattering in Chinese patois in that 
high-spirited manner which belongs to cooks all over 
the world. But they certainly work well, and their 
kitchens look neat as new pins. The people have 
the real Californian dislike to the race. It is com- 



ON THE WING. 97 

plained that the}' are saucy, untruthful, and exceedingly 
secretive ; harsh to children and intolerant of any call 
at unusual times. I am afraid, however, that the last 
hvo attributes are not confined to Ah Sin or Wah 
Lee, in the rose-bowered cuisines of Los Angeles, 
but that they are possessed in full force by their 
co-laborers of Commonwealth avenue and Beacon 
street. It is hardly fair to blame one people for the 
sole possession of the little leaven which leavens the 
whole lump of humanity. We are still unused to the 
prejudices of the country, and a little taken aback by 
the contempt shown the Mongolian on all sides. Small 
children pull their queues with mighty jerks in the 
street, or jump on the square toes of their wooden 
shoes, or fling dust in their faces, with as much un- 
concern as if thev were brazen imajjes instead of 
ordinary flesh and blood ; and any remonstrance on a 
stranger's part is taken with a pitying shrug for his 
simplicity, and the reassuring formula, "Why, it's 
only a Chinaman " ! as if that explained everything. 




CHAPTER VIII. 

A CALIFORNIAN STAGE-RIDE. 

'E left Los Angeles toward sunset, and came 
down the lovely valley between tlic foot- 
hills of the Bernardino Range, while the 
shadow of a great storm-cloud hung about the moun- 
tain tops. Here and there in rifts the sunshine fell 
on yellow fields of wild mustard, and mile after 
mile of brilliant scarlet and orange cactus blossoms. 
Tall spikes of white yucca lilies, growing on slim, 
straight stems like pyramidal clusters of silver cande- 
labra, ten or twenty feet high, added greater novelty to 
a scene already novel enough, and gave us another 
glimpse of the resources of California in flowers. 
Long wisps of a brilliant saffron-colored grass or 
moss were tan2;led in the tall sa9"e-bushes, and shone 
like flame in the low evening light. Besides all this 
was the inexplicable home-feeling of finding ourselves 
once more in the cars, vis-a-vis with the old familiar 
faces. It is extraordinary how rreat a chancre has taken 
place in this regard since we left Boston. Then, the 
train was the embodiment of discomfort, the neces- 
sary evil to be borne for the sake of the good to which 
it was leading us. But now, no matter how pleasant 
the stopping-place, nor how great its restful luxury, 
the cars are emphatically Jiofne. In them we fall into 



lOO ON THE WING. 

those easy lines of least resistance, that gossipy free- 
dom of a common household, that happy unrestraint 
which makes the charm of one's ain fireside. If 
familiarity even breeds a little animosity now and 
then, it only makes the resemblance [greater. What 
would home-life be without an occasional love-s;:at ! 
So that altogether this evening v/as one of tranquil 
delight — but the morning made up for it. 

The traveller who desires to enter the Yosemite 
with his natural dispositions undisturbed by angry 
passions, and his receptiveness unspoiled by a rank- 
ling sense of injustice, had better by all odds tele- 
graph beforehand to tlie starting-point from the rail- 
road, and have his place taken on the regular stages. 
These accommodate, on the Madera route, just tv/enty- 
tvvo persons daily; the remainder wait over for an- 
other day, if they are sensible; they take an extra, if 
they are fools. An extra, means crov/ding and discom- 
fort; it means poor horses, and few of them ; it means 
no relays and all sorts of hitches; it means, f.nall}-, 
taking two days for one day's journey, and wasting 
more whip-lash and misusing more Scriptural language 
in the course of forty-eiglit Iiours, than was ever ac- 
com^lished in the same time before. If there is any 
other discomfort that can be added to the natural list 
of weariness, dust, or mud, it is naturally throv/n in as 
an extra also, but, for a wonder, without additional 
charge; every other item you pay for. 

Probably no party ever entered the trail leading to 
the valley under more depressing circumstances than 
ours. The wretched car porter, moved by that ani- 



ON THE WING. lOI 

mosity which seems to be the leading principle of liis 
race, roused us, in the midst of a barren, flat plain, 
absolutely devoid of even a semblance of vegetation, 
at five, when seven would have done just as well. For 
fifty miles we passed only an occasional desolate- 
looking settlement of unpainted wooden shanties, and 
no other sign of life. Human nature naturally rebels 
against early rising; the world is at sixes and sevens, 
like any other housekeeper before nine o'clock in the 
morning. Even the remarkably good breakfast we 
found ready at the hotel was not able to soothe our 
ruffled spirits. Immediately after, we were packed 
like sardines into a jerky, narrow, old-fashioned wagon, 
and after creeping ten miles over a plain, witli a fume 
like a gigantic caterpillar sixty miles long, crawling 
into the mountains at one side of it, the driver cooly 
informed us that we were to have no change of horses, 
and were to sleep at Coarse Gold Gulch that night, 
instead of going through to Clark's. The sting of this 
injustice rankled in our hearts like a barbed arrow 
that every jolt of the springless vehicle drove deep 
and deeper. There was no redress possible, which 
added insult to injury; and the driver could not be 
made to understand how much we ought to be pitied, 
which was the final ounce that broke the camcfs 
back. To one who has a real grievance, there is 
nothing so annihilating as to have any one else refuse 
to acknowledge it. To cap the climax, the rain, which 
we had been laughed at for predicting, began to come 
down in torrents ; and, according to the summer cus- 
tom, every awning and curtain had been stripped from. 



I02 ON THE WING. 

the carriage some weeks before. Rain on top of a 
stage-coach is always bad enough ; but rain sleeting 
on unprotected heads and shoulders, whose rightful 
umbrellas and waterproofs are packed in trunks hun- 
dreds of miles away, because their owners have been 
brow-beaten into believing that they won't need 
them — aye, there's the rub. 

The amount of antagonism the average mind can 
engender under such circumstances is simply terrific; 
and, under all this dead weight of temper and turbu- 
lence, we were trying to see the Yo Semite. And 
ivhen the " I told you so" of officious friends came to 
mind, as it always does in similar conditions, we were 
as near madness as people usually get. 

The much-abused driver, who really had no part in 
this pretty little quarrel, as he was simply obeying 
orders, vainly tried to interest us in his patient team: 
"Them horses know more'n we think for," said he; 
"they've got their hitches an' feelin's jest like any on 
us ; there 's Skylight, that off leader, he 's got sech a 
ambition for goin' that he'll pull the flesh off his 
bones when there ain't no need on it. Now there's 
Snowflake wouldn't draw a settin' hen off her nest — • 
Git up, Snowflake ! Durn it, hev more spirit! Chub, 
here, she's a queer 'un; you swar' at her and hit her 
a clip, an' she jest throws up the sponge ; but chirp 
her up a little and sort o' tickle her, this way, an' she 
goes for all she's wuth, every time. Yes 'm, they 've 
got to be humored jest like you'n me sometimes, an' 
don't you forgit it." I must do the poor man the 
tardy justice of saying that he bore our ill-temper 



ON THE Vn^ING. 103 

with the patience of Job, and was much more lenient 
than we deserved to find him. 

He was a bright, cheery, talkative, small person, 
full of pleasant quips and cranks, rich in anecdote, 
and determined always to keep the best foot foremost. 
It hurt his feelings more than our own, to be obliged 
to lash his tired animals, but there was no other mode 
of progression possible. He deserved a better "fare,'* 
than our discontented car-load ; but Christianity, after 
eighteen hundred years, has not yet been able to 
teach her children how to bear imposition without 
storming, and laying on the shoulders of the wrong 
man, when they cannot reach the right one, — which 
is our excuse for sinning against him. 

It was only at evening, when a little bit of paradise 
opened before us, in smooth grain fields level as an 
English lawn, with a few superb oaks and pines, set 
singly like the arrangement of a park, and beautiful 
mountains covered with forests sloping gently down 
to the edge of a rapid rushing brook, that we became 
again reconciled to fate. After a plentiful supper, 
with the very best omelet souflee a Chinese cook ever 
made, we went out to see a gold and purple sunset 
blaze over the western summits and fill the east with 
rosy flushes before the tender lingering twilight folded 
the broad piazza and small cottage ; and realizing then 
that we had been spared twenty-six miles more of 
jerking and jolting, we began to allow ourselves to be 
sedately happy. The little wooden house was kept by 
a German family, with seven or eight fair- haired, 
placid-faced children, who seemed to have preserved 



I04 ON THE WING. 

the easy Teutonic formulas of life as perfectly here as 
if they were still at home in Deutchland. But it was 
not until next night, at Clark's, tliat we really got into 
harmony with the place we were coming to. Under 
any other circumstances, it would have been a delight 
to go through these lovely spots. The road winds in 
a thousand sharp curves around and between the 
mountains, fringed with wonderful trees, and at every 
moment a fresh vista opens. Exquisite little glades, 
green and smooth as a meadow, with groups cf shrub- 
bery, round and perfect as art could make them, show 
at each turn. Delicate fronds of white lilac, frail 
and ethereal as frost flow^ers and fragrant as orange 
blossoms, fill the air with delicious perfume; groups 
of tall spray-like yellow roses, called for some obscure 
reason leather-brush ; clumps of large white dogwood 
blossoms, and brilliant clusters of Manzanita, their 
vivid maroon velvety stems showing like ribbons 
between the fine, small leaves of pale-green ; all these 
were arranged as in a pleasant garden, and in most 
luxuriant condition. 

Between them now and again came a white oak, 
the bark ribbed like alligator hide, the magnificent 
foliage massed in solid green, or the slender, spray- 
hke needles of young pines or cedars. The succession 
of these lovely vistas and green knolls is as charming 
as unexpected, and you reahze at last what it is that 
has been wanting to the loveliness of the lower coun- 
try, in which trees have always been small and few. 
Gradually as the day wears on, the character of the 
landscape changes. The precipices are wilder and 



ON THE WING. 



105 



higher; the oaks fewer; enormous j^ines and cedars, 
growing constantly larger, usurp the place of all other 
trees. The undergrowth begins to increase until the 
ground is covered wnth one tangled mass ; wild fiowcrs 
disappear; more ruggedness creeps into the beauty; 
under-branches of trees begin to grow bare and with- 
ered, or are covered with fine, bright, yellowish moss. 
For the last five or six hours one passes through the 
immense growths of this celebrated country; the trees 
towering 120, 150, sometimes 200 feet; overhead a 
solid mass of foliage through which flickering sun- 
light and dappled shadows fall; while beneath, like 
vast cathedral aisles, the bare, giant trunks, stretch in 
every direction. These are the woods which were 
God's first temples, and in them still lingers the in- 
cense breath of prayer and praise. 

Clark's is a lovely spot ; we drove with a last spurt 
of our jaded horses and a last rattling crack of the 
driver's worn-out whip up to the front door, through a 
drove of three thousand sheep and lambs, which tlieir 
Chinese herders were trying to force across the 
Merced. It had the effect of a ship tossing on a rest- 
less sea, and was picturesque after we had passed them. 
But I would as soon not return to our muttons. The 
pleasant noise of a saw-mill mingles with the rushing 
river which turns its wheel, and small logs, as logs go 
here, from four to six feet in diameter, wait their turn 
in the yard. A pet fawn comes up and slips his 
slender nose into your hand, as you walk about in the 
delicious air, stretching your legs after the long, 
cramped drive ; down the long slope the fresh night 



Io6 ON THE WING. 

breeze, half inspiration, half lullaby, comes stealing; 
the moon climbs across the deep-blue horizon, and we 
grow to be conscious tiiat the charm of the place is 
upon us. The house is so built that every room, both 
above and below stairs, opens on a balcony, which 
gives a sense of airiness and freedom not often found 
in liner houses. There are great fireplaces in each of 
the parlors, full at this time of the year with aglow of 
blazing logs. I could not shake off a feeling that we 
were near home, among the White Mountains, in the 
entrance hall of the Profile House, and that a few 
hours might bring us back to the people we loved. 

The drive from Clark's was a repetition of the best 
points of the day before. We had glorious weather; 
a sky like Colorado; an air brilliant and odorous ; a 
succession of wonderful gorges and deep ravines, 
that kept delight constantly on tiptoe, and a glorious 
team of six. fine horses, with a roomy stage. We had 
a grizzled Scotchman for a driver, canny and kind, — 
an old forty-niner, with a get-up like McKee Rankin's 
in the play, — who knew the pedigree of every head in 
his stock, and had more yarns about the valley legends 
than would fill a volume. We listened with great 
interest to the account of Cocoanut-John, the "nigh 
leader's" rheumatiz, and Billy T. and Emigrant, the 
two " Swing's," little peculiarities. It was such a 
luxury to have that dreadful whip silent, and not feel 
that Bergh should be telegraphed to on account o£ 
the poor worn-out creatures, that our spirits rose to 
concert pitch. 

The curves and precipices grew swifter and steeper; 



ON THE WING. I07 

the beautiful, tall, symmetrical trees, straight as ar- 
rows, shot into the air; the swaying stage rocked up 
and down dizzy mountain-sides at every gait from a 
snaiTs pace to a mad gallop ; we grev/, as usual, un- 
conscious of danger, and half inebriated with its 
nearness ; for the breaking of a trace, the swerving 
of a foot, the slipping of a screw, v/ould launch the 
whole equipage into space, like a bolt from a cross- 
bow. I cannot tell what mental exhilaration takes 
possession of one and puts fear so far av/ay that even 
those who are cowards by nature lose sight cf it; but 
respectable people who get out of barges going up 
the twcnt3^-foot slope of Green Hill at home, and 
would consider it suicide to drive up a higher eleva- 
tion, cling to their seats here like acrobats, and would 
like to urge the flying horses taster! 

Suddenly across the clear sapphire of the sky a 
long, trailing cloud floated like a white feather toward 
the zenith; suddenly, again, another and another came 
tumbling upon it, until in less than twenty minutes we 
were in the midst of a skurrying mountain-storm of 
pelting rain. Beloved people three thousand miles 
away who dream of California as a land where the 
sun shines without a frown or tear to mar its placid 
loveliness for months together, and who are taught to 
believe that the wall of the Rocky Mountains inter- 
poses a rainless barrier between earth and heaven, 
take heed and warning! Bring your rubbers and 
your gossamers and your strongest umbrellas; never 
go out without them any more than you would in 
England ; turn a deaf ear to the amiable idiots who 
tell you anything to the contrary, and make up your 



Io8 ON THE WING. 

sensible mind, once for all, that though God certainly 
might make a mountainous country rain-proof, yet He 
certainly never has ; then you won't come to grief or 
dampness, and your temper, as well as your travelling 
suit, will be unspoiled. 

It was about two o'clock in the afternoon. We 
had been travelling for nearly three days through a 
country of such stupendous wnldness and utter deso- 
lation as left the soul at once subdued and i.iplifted. 
Except at the two little dining-stations, the sheds 
where horses were changed, and a few small settle- 
ments on the flats, there had been no sign of Jiuman 
life or habitation through the entire distance. The 
sense of isolation from the outer earth was so pro- 
found that it seemed as if weeks had elapsed since 
the shrieking engine had torn its way across the plain 
at Madera, and left us, untried explorers, at the outer 
walls of this new world. 

At last, after one final, sharp turn, that took even 
our experience by surprise, we came to the bare edge 
of a mighty precipice and halted. We were on In- 
spiration Point. Around us, the pelting rain still 
poured heavily ; above, the black storm-cloud hung in 
low folds almost upon the tree tops, but toward the 
west, its jagged edges were lifted, and a bit of clear 
sky blazed like a sapphire through dull gra}'. One 
shining white cloud floated across this glowing blue, 
and through it the afternoon sun poured a flood of 
dazzling light into the Valley ! The Valley which was 
the end of our dreams and hopes, towards which i:n- 
consciously our hearts had been turning through all 
the changes of the long journey, with which we had 



ON THE WING. 1 09 

been blindly comparing every scene that approached 
sublimity before ! Dropped at our very feet, and 
clothed in such fair proportions of majesty and beauty 
as made it more a spiritual joy than an earthly loveli- 
ness, it rested, silent and set apart, as if human eyes 
for the first time beheld it; wrapped in a veil of soft, 
purple mist, that made it seem, in spite of its near- 
ness, like a vision that would fade while we gazed. In 
front, El Capitan, erect and fearless, as became the 
warden of the magic world beyond, lifting its bare,, 
white front three thousand feet in one superb perpen- 
dicular line from base to summit; opposite, the soft- 
falling, swaying foam of the falls bounding nearly a 
thousand feet through the air before it struck the 
broken rocks below ; beyond the rounded curves of 
the Three Graces, the sweeping line of the South 
Dome, and far-away the veiled summit of Cloud's 
Rest, piled with soft, gray shadows. A broken line of 
shining v/ater came like a silver thread, showing here 
and there in the depths of the lovely valley, and 
broadened into a small mirrored lake almost at our 
feet below. It was — if I have used the same words 
before, forgive me — beyond conception and utterance. 
The sense of solitude, of peace, and of an inspiration 
which sprang from both was so profound as to be 
oppressive. Even the most frivolous spirits among 
us were struck with sudden calm, as if they stood at 
the portals of some divine mystery, and it was with a 
feeling almost of relief that we turned away at last, 
and went zigzaging down the dreadful slope of the 
dizzy mountain to enter in at the gates below. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE VALLEY OF THE GREAT GRIZZLY BEAR. 

THE last two miles of the descent into the 
valley was much the worst bit of trail we 
had come to in the whole hundred miles of 
staging. The curves were so desperately abrupt 
where the Z shaped road turned back upon itself, that 
the noses of our leaders were actually over the preci- 
pice before they could swing themselves around, and 
a faint, sickening dread that the entire team would 
follow their noses kept one in a constant state of per- 
turbation. But still, as we looked from one side or 
the other into the beautiful depths below, the feeling 
that it was good to be here overwhelmed every other, 
and it was Vv^ith a sort of mute admiration that we 
drove at last up the winding valley road, under boughs 
still wet and shining from the recent storm. Every 
stain of dust had been wiped away, and nature was 
freshly garlanded to greet us. Behind, deep-muttering 
thunder still went on like salvos of artillery echoing 
from crag to crag; before, the yellow sunshine sun 
poured down, casting long shadows across the grass, 
and weaving rainbows through pale mists which were 
flying high up in the rocky ramparts. We were in a 
narrow cleft, between straight walls of pale, gray stone 
which towered thousands of feet above, cutting the 



112 ON THE WING. 

clear, blue air in myriad forms of domes and spires and 
sudden, sharp angles. All sense of proportion is lost 
in the immensity of dimension; one becomes stupetled 
at last v/ith the blunders made in guessing heights and 
distances, and maintains a discreet silence. Glimpses 
through the trees, as well as a rushing sound of 
waters, proclaim the approach to the Bridal Veil 
Falls, and soon the driver halts to allow a nearer view 
of tlie foam-tangled, swaying, snowy cataract, which 
bursts like a white fury from the rocks above to the 
rocks below. Its muffled roar makes the silence of the 
spot only more impressive. The curving road goes 
on bending more toward the river, where the rapid 
current of the Muscat and its brilliant green color 
reminds one of the rapids above Niagara. A bridge 
spans the swift stream on the left, where a path leads 
toward El Capitan, which looks down still from its 
mighty elevation, its giant outline changed now ta 
that of some waiting Sphinx looking with unseeing 
eyes toward the future. At a certain point you are 
asked to look at a silhouette of the Wandering Jew 
etched on the face of the cliff ; but, as a matter of 
fact, any healthy imagination can make scores of. such 
pictures at every new hundred feet of scarred and 
weather-beaten wall. As one point fades, another 
opens; the snowy summit of Cloud's Rest drops out 
of sight behind To-coy-ae ; the Three Brothers lift 
their heads from under the shadow of the Great 
Chief of the Valley ; the Virgin Lung-oo-too-koo-ya 
drops her slender pearly tears from her cloud eyrie ; 
high on the right the Sentinel disputes your path ; 



ON THE WING. II3 

while far to the left, his long, bright fleece trailing 
behind him, the Large Grizzly Bear himself, the Great 
Yd Semite, plunges three thousand feet through the 
air in three mad bounds, and dashes himself to pieces 
on the rocks beneath. This is the most satisfying of 
all the wonderful cataracts of this wonderful valley ; 
even its voice is more sonorous and deeper than any 
in the entire circuit of the hills. Mingled with its 
constant, deep-mouthed roar come irregular detona" 
tions like the far-off rattling of musketry, or like the 
deep recurrent beat of the ocean against a stormy 
coast, when the under-tow beats broken pebbles 
about, and the sweeping tide thunders now and again 
against the great rocks. Twenty times that first night 
after entering the Valley, I was conscious of that 
satisfying, omnipresent tone ; and, deliciously tossed 
between sleeping and waking, imagined myself at 
home in the little house, with a nor'-easter beating the 
wild Atlantic into fury before the door. 

Meantime, as we still drive on, the beautiful 
emerald river is flowing swiftly through cool, moist 
meadows by our side, and patches of firs at the 
base of our fortress walls begin to fall somewhat in 
shadow. We pass the long, low, white cottage and 
outbuildings at Cook's, lovely though the spot is, and 
go on to H. H.'s little cottage by the river up above, 
to a tiny chamber whose window opens directly on 
both river and fall. A belt of oaks and alders, shinv 
mering all day above the swift stream, is all that 
separates you from the lofty peak of Eagle's Rest, 
down the front of which tumbles the sweeping water- 



114 ^^ THE WING. 

fall. You can sit at your small-paned casement and 
drink in its beauty from early morn to dewy eve; 
better, still, you can lie in bed at night and see the sil- 
ver spangles of moonlight fall in phosphorescent flakes, 
as it tosses airily downward. The tree that shades 
your narrow balcony has its roots in the stream, and 
the eddying, rippling flow fascinates you as a sea-coal 
fire would on a winter niirht. The air is thrillinof with 
bird notes and frasfrant with sweet-briar and wild 
jessamine ; there are familiar faces on the weather- 
beaten porch of the small cottage opposite ; the world 
is brimming over with the fresh beauty of May-time," 
and you are in the heart of the Yo Semite, shut out 
by its white walls from the tumult and greed and 
wickedness. Can life offer anything more.^ Alas for 
contentment ! Could any walls lower than heaven 
itself shut out love and longing? We sigh, even 
here, for the clinging arms of the blessed babies. 

For the first four days after entering the valley, we 
took no note of time. It was enough to sit silent and 
satisfied, and let the wonderment and glory sink into 
our souls, so that through all aftertime, while time 
should last for us, there might be some clear, blissful 
memory of it left. We simply looked and listened. 
Could anyone speak in presence of such a preacher.'* 
But we were moved occasionally beyond the power 
of Christian endurance, at sight of the restless, hurry- 
ing, foolish people, who, tired and worn with the long 
journey to the gates, and untouched by the awful sub- 
limity within, were bent upon "doing" the valley. 
We grew to hate these words with such exceeding 



ON THE WING. II5 

hatred, as made us desire blindly to behead every one 
who uttered them. Wildly rushing from point to point, 
up this trail and down that woodpath, here at five in the 
morning, and there until six at night, always anxious 
and unsatisfied, and tired and footsore, — how we did 
pity the foolish virgins who, in grasping for many 
things, lost the one only needful ! To see the agony, 
so poorly hidden behind a sickly smile, on the middle- 
aged faces, unused to this kind of grimacing, that went 
ambling or cantering by on the patient steeds ever)- 
morning ! To listen to the doleful, pathetic account of 
nerves and feelings after the same faces, with more 
agony and less smile, had come back in the evening. 
The heroism of Joan of Arc, the self-sacrifice of Flor- 
ence Nightingale, the determination of Catherine of 
Russia, and the resignation of the women of Lucknow, 
all combined and boiled down, are not a circumstance 
to the immolation of any woman over fort}', who for 
the first time in her life, mounts a horse to scale one of 
these mountain peaks. She bears the moral scars of 
her victory on her face for days. She is afraid of the 
horse, she is afraid of the precipices, she is afraid of 
herself; heaven and earth seem to be passing away as 
she begins to climb, and to have passed altogether 
when she begins to descend. Every muscle is wrenched 
by the effort to hold back or lean forward ; every 
nerve is tortured by the strain of enduring and the 
dread of horrors to come ; the poor farce of a guide a 
hundred feet off, with four or five horses between, 
being of help, if her animal's fore feet slip or hind feet 
stumble over the edge of the trail, is so apparent, and 



Il6 ON THE WING. 

the idiocy of her ever liaving made the attempt so 
patent, that she would give the world for the relief of 
a good cry if she could only get down and have it out. 
And all because fashion prescribes a certain mode of 
procedure. You may be gifted with good legs and 
honest lungs, a sound heart and clear head, but )ou 
must not use them in climbing. It is not according 
to Hoyle. They say that you will be tired and lame 
and unstrung for days after. But I, I who speak to 
you, do give you my word of honor that you will have 
three times the physical weariness and five times the 
nervous strain after you have done the same thing on 
horseback. 

I do not speak from experience; no, dear madame. 
I speak from observation, which is always a cheaper 
and often a wiser teacher. The stories Avhich were 
poured into our pitying ears night after night by the 
unfortunates who had run the gauntlet were quite 
enough to keep any sane woman out of it. We sat 
quiet, as I say, for da3-s, until some of the spirit of 
tlie place had entered into us, and then began to v/alk. 
First into the foam and fury at the foot of the Great 
Falls, where drenched with spray and wild Avitli exul- 
tation, we could be shaken by every falling throb of 
the wonderful power before us. Then about the 
valley, with a climb here and there for a fern or a leaf 
or flower, and a perfect understanding of the times 
for lunch and dinner. Then to Mirror Lake, to see 
the sun rise over the arch of the rocky wall five thou- 
sand feet above, while we followed his reflection in 
the cool, placid depths of the water below, and tried 



ON THE WING. I IJ 

to imagine we saw the double refraction. Then grown 
bolder, with lunch, knapsack and waterproof — and 
don't you forget it — strapped on back, to Glacier 
Point and down again the same day, shaken, tired, but 
supremely happy. So it went on. We did not see, 
perhaps, for want of time, as many separate views ; 
we did not have a guide to tell us the name of every 
boulder w^e tipped over, or every point wc glanced at ; 
but we learned our lessons by heart, as well as eye- 
sight, and those are the teachings remembered longest. 
The formation of the valley, inclosed within those 
lofty walls which drop apart as if some infinite might 
had cleaved them in twain, and in the rent between 
set this bit of sylvan beauty, with its stream of living 
waters, its deep, fragrant meadows and over-arching 
trees, is something stupendous and terrible. Mighty 
barriers fill all the horizon, set straightly between 
earth and heaven; you can scarcely imagine a world 
outside it. The leaping water-falls pouring over the 
top of this awful barricade seem as if sprung from 
some mysterious source; it is only when half-way 
skyward, on some dizzy mountain-trail, that one sees 
rising beyond the snowy heights which supply those 
eternal fountains. But from the floor of the valley 
there is no hint of anything beyond or above. The 
narrow strip of sky, full hour by hour of changing 
cloud effects, paints the grayish-white surface of rock 
with as many tints as the moonstone. Sometimes it 
is black as night; sometimes white as snow; some- 
times full of a sinister and awful calm; sometimes 
broken into a thousand shifting bits, which almost 



Il8 ON THE WING. 

seem to move while one looks at them. The place is 
a mine of optical illusions. Lean back against the 
sheer wall of El Capitan and look upward: you are 
the centre of a semi-circular arch, wdiich seems to 
project hundreds of feet above and in front of you. 
Cross from the middle, the little strip of land between 
the base of the mountains, which looks in all and at 
most a few hundred yards, and you will walk a mile 
before reaching either side. Try, as I said before, to 
guess the height of any one of the peaks, or points, 
or waterfalls, and you will sit up all night to be 
ashamed of your crooked judgment, unless, like me, 
you are wise enough to despise statistics. What good 
does it do you to know a thing is three thousand or 
six thousand feet high, when 3'ou have no more idea 
than the man in the moon of how high three or six 
thousand feet is ? (3f course, I could explain by say- 
ing it is fifteen or thirty times as high as but no, 

I will most positively;/*'^/ drag Bunker Hill monument 
again into the Yo Semite Valley: it has been done too 
often already. And if I should give you the entire 
table of altitudes set out in fair Arabic numerals, what 
better idea would you have of the glor}-, the grandeur, 
the utter wonder, of this entrancing spot? Pictures 
have given you some warped impression of its out- 
line. Any school-boy in the country wmII tell you that 
it is nine miles long, and from one to two miles 
wide ; that its perpendicular walls are nearly a mile 
in sheer precipices set around it : that the moun- 
tains surrounding average four or six thousand feet, 
and that waterfalls burst in tangled skeins of silver 



ON THE WING. * I If) 

from every crevice of the rock. But neither school- 
])oy nor school-master can tell you anything more, 
until your own ej-es bring' it home at last to your own 
soul, as I sincerely hope they ma^■. 

We stopped at Barnard's hotel, if four little cot- 
tages, two by the river-side and two opposite among 
the rocks, can be called by such a dignified title. 
The chambers are no bigger than a steamboat state- 
room ; the ceilings are made of cotton cloth ; the 
walls are covered with bright paper, and the floor with 
a hand's-breadth of carpet; there is a wholesome 
straw-bed and a featheV-pillow, plenty of bed-clothes, 
and, candor compels me to confess, of mosquitoes. 
Vou can have unlimited water and towels on your 
small washstand, and there is a healthy, hard pine 
chair, if you desire to sit down. There is no lock on 
^•our door, and no key, if there were one : the sun 
comes by day, and the silent stars peep at night into 
the hallway, with its open doors at front and back, for 
the thoroughfare through the house is as open as the 
grassy path before it. It is primitive as primitive 
can be, therefore in harmony with the wild nature 
around it. One sitting-room has been built around 
tlie base of a tree ten feet in diameter, whose top 
waves in the sunshine a hundred and fifty feet above 
tlie lowly roof. Whatever fine flavor is needed to 
make its homely but plentiful fare palatable, is given 
by the wonderful picture of the swift-flowing river, 
and the glorious beauty of the great falls outside the 
windows of the clean, plain dining-room. By and by 
some vandal u ill come and buy Mr. Barnard out ; 



I20 ON THE WING. 

then there will go up a five-story monstrosity of a 
fashionable house, with electric bells and set wash- 
bowls, hair mattresses and modern airs. And we will 
thank our lucky stars that we came in before the 
innovations ! 

We strolled over the plank-walk laid across the 
meadows to-night, in a veritable twilight of the gods, 
while day faded slowly up the stupendous heights and 
the long-lingering shadows crept close, hke dusky 
lovers, embracing the beautiful valley. Coming back 
a httle later, we saw the full moon rise five times in 
fifteen minutes from behind one peak after another. 
And, now, one side of the valley lifts mountainous 
walls of ebon blackness into the starlit sky, while the 
other is shining as in transfiguration; the. falls are 
radiant as an avalanche of snow; the river lies like 
a sheet of molten silver; while the trees, every leaf 
and twig, touched into microscopic distinctness, are 
reflected as in a Claude Lorraine mirror. Serene in 
its stern grandeur, with the very soul of solitude at 
rest on its lofty battlements, and the cold moonhght 
heightening its most awful beauty, it is the picture 
I would like to take away in my heart forever of the 
Yo Semite. 



CHAPTER X. 

A CLIMB THROUGH THE CLOUDS. 

THE walk to Glacier Point, or rather the climb, 
for there are not two consecutive steps of 
level ground in the wliole of it with one small 
exception, was the most brilliant achievement of our 
/ives. We started early in the morning, an hour be- 
fore the sun had got down into the valley, and thus 
escaped much of the heat and dust which are so 
terrific later. The constantly changing path gave a 
succession of exquisite views as we mounted higher 
and higher, looking now up, now down the ravine. 
One by one, familiar landmarks came in sight ; one 
by one others, unknown, appeared beyond them, until 
the whole mountain caiion was before us with one 
pale-blue line of summits closing it at either end. 
The windings of the Merced showed themselves in all 
their curving beauty, cultivated fields looked like 
squares on a checker-board, the great herd of horses 
in the yard behind the stables dwindled to sizes like 
the animals in a child's ark, and the stables themselves 
like houses in a toy village. Gradually, behind the 
Yosemite Fall, wliicli has always looked before as if 
dropped out of the blue sky, with no tangible earthly 
foundation, a range of tumbled peaks began to rise 
which looked, later on, as we stood on the highest 



122 ON THE WING. 

point, like a plateau of mountains stretching out to an 
infinite distance. The winding cavalcade of . mounted 
knights and dames, some brave, some pallid, all a little 
anxious, passed us near the end while we were muncli- 
ing frozen snow from a crevice in the rocks and 
enjoying the view from the last turn. I never was so 
sincerely thankful for anything, in the course of a 
moderately long life, as that I was not on one of those 
winged steeds, especially as two or three turned their 
stupid heads to look over the precipice, as if they 
were meditating suicide. The path was so hard and 
steep that I would not at all wonder to see the poor, 
tired creatures take this easy way of reaching the 
pleasant pastures below, when it comes to going down, 
The last few hundred yards are through a grove of 
trees, stately and beautiful, with mountain brooks 
flowing between, and the unpainted walls of a large 
frame house showing like a welcome in the distance. 
By this time, although you have become somewhat 
used to the ascent, and learned the logic of resting 
for a moment at every dozen steps, the continued 
strain lias begun to tell on the faithful calves which 
have carried you so nobly, and it is with content deep 
and inexpressible that you cross through the dining- 
room of the little house and throw yourself into one 
of the rocking-chairs on the narrow piazza in front. 
Such a delicious resting-place, and such a wonderful 
sight ! For you have come, as it were, to the gates 
of another country than the one left behind. Here 
is once more that loveliest of all earthly things, a 
snowy range, stretching on either hand till it fades 



ON THE WING. 123 

in the distance; here is Cloiicrs Rest, with a floating 
veil of trailing gray across it; here is South Dome 
rising in tremendous bold majesty, overtopping every- 
thing else in its imposing nearness ; and here is the 
beautiful line of the Nevada and Vernal Falls, show- 
ing from this elevation like one continuous sweep of 
cataract and rapid, as it tumbles between the trees on 
its headlong way down the canon. The soft haze 
which distance weaves about the farther summits gives 
a dreamy effect of immense distance, and intensifies 
the expression of wonderful distinctness and clearness 
in the nearer atmosphere. Far beyond, to the right, 
the most beautiful point of the whole, to which they 
have given the name of one who so loved God's world 
as to be counted one of its prophets, Mt. Starr King 
rises; the Little Yosemite fills the middle distance; 
and farthest of all, where the faint, remote peaks melt 
into the dim horizon, some one shows you where the 
Lost \^alley rests. How I would like to stay here a 
year and a day until I found it again ! 

A path to the left through the woods, leads to an 
overhang^ino^ leds^e, somethinsf like table-rock at Niag:- 
ara, but on an immense scale, which commands a 
view^ of the entire valley as it lies like a map three 
thousand two hundred feet below. A slight iron 
balustrade is all that protects the dizzy height ; and 
leaning far out and over, we hurl great rocks down 
only to see them whirled inward and out of sight 
before they have fallen half the distance, some under- 
current of air scooping them toward the base of the 
cliff. A small moving speck, as large as a walnut. 



124 ON THE WING. 

resolves itself through the glasses into a country team 
passing on the river-road, and the pools running up 
toward Mirror Lake flash like a necklace of diamonds. 
One feels as if in the centre of a great silent world, 
with the first hush of creation yet upon it. 

Just behind us sat a quartette of young New York 
girls, or belles, — every New York young girl is a 
belle by right divine, I believe, — who, with the un- 
awed instincts of their race, rattled on in the usual 
high American key about the merits of their respective 
bootmakers. They could not quite ignore the scenery, 
nor could they waste all their time in looking at it, 
while the preeminence of Louis Ouinze or Louis 
Ouatorze, in the matter of French heels, was still 
undecided. Their innocent babble, which would have 
been exhilarating in any other place, pointed as it was 
by punctuation-marks made by the prettiest feet in the 
world, and charming little bursts of light-hearted 
confidences, seemed just a little out of place in the 
broad, serene, magnificent amphitheatre they had 
chosen to make a shoe-shop of. But there is no 
accounting for tastes. If some people would rather 
have French heels and table d'hote on Fifth avenue, 
to the wild witchery of nature and the sour bread of 
the Valley inns, why, let them. I 'd take the dinner 
of herbs and the dusty boots any time. 

Looking at the South Dome from this point, its bald 
summit lifted 6,200 feet into the air, a sheer precipice 
of naked rock on one side for the last thousand feet, 
it seems absolutely inaccessible. It has been reached, 
however, by means of a rope, which some first daring 



ON THE WIN(i. 



125 



spirit left fastened to a support above, and by steps 
cut into the perpendicular cliff, up which the dizzy 
climber toils and clings, fastened by other ropes, to 
the waist of the guide in front. When we remember 
the slight young girl living, in the valley below, who 
told so simply last night of having twice accomplished 
this wonderful feat, a thrill of positive terror shivers 
through us. Daughter of one of the pioneer fami- 
lies, living almost from childhood in the shadow of 
this awful majesty, it must be that some unknown 
strength of love and pride, born of long intimacy with 
this wonder world, sustained her slender wrists in that 
terrible upward struggle. Ordinary nerves could never 
vitalize ordinary muscles to such an extent. 

A touching incident which brought the sad tender- 
ness of human interest home even to this wild, remote 
spot, which looks in its isolation as if set apart from 
the happenings of ordinary life, was related by this 
same young girl. One of her sisters had an intimate 
friend in one of the two or three neighboring fami- 
lies, which, with their own, make up the entire settle- 
ment. There existed between these two an uncommon 
union of sentiment and feeling; they explored together 
the wildest spots, until every inch of the valley had 
been made familiar to their eager eyes ; they worked, 
studied, and dreamed together, and lived in that un- 
selfish devotion so often found between two ardent 
girls, and so rarely elsewhere. Gifted beyond their 
surroundings, they were the ornament of the little 
community, and leaders of every social gathering. 
Suddenly, and without seeming cause, one of these 



126 ON THE WING. 

bright, active, health}- hves, weakened and faded; and 
before her fair face had been a month under the snow 
of her wintry grave, her friend was laid beside her. 
It was, except for an infant lost before, the first time 
death had come to the valley, and its shadow was still 
upon the stricken hearts of its people when we spoke 
with them. In every family within the circle of the 
mountain walls, the names of these two dear girls, 
coupled as they alwa}S were together, was a household 
word of love and lono-in":. 

We were loth to leave the wonders of this upper 
world. Every instant a new surprise met us in some 
view lovelier than the last, and we were annoyed to 
find that if properly informed below, we could have 
arranged to stay all night on the summit and see the 
glories of sunset and sunrise from this eyrie in mid 
air. It would have been like a new heaven and new 
earth freshly created for our ravished eyes, but the 
conservative policy of the inn-keepers in the valley had 
prevented any knowledge of it, so we were obliged 
reluctantly to turn our faces downward. I put the 
information here, that later, happier mortals may make 
use of it, and think of me when they come into their 
kingdom. 

We started on the descent, unfortunately, about two 
o'clock: the very hottest time of the hottest day of 
the year. The trail was four inches deep with soft, 
dry dust ; the sun glowed like a carbuncle against the 
shining, hot rock into which the path was cut ; the 
air blew as if from the fiery depths of tophet; our 
Alpen stocks would not catch in the light, fluffy, 



ON THE WING. 127 

powdery soil; and we tore with giant strides down the 
mountain sides, inflamed by turns with heat and 
admiration, until we were sights to behold. Anything 
so tremendous as this oven-like temperature it had 
never been my lot to experience before. The sultriest 
August dog-day that ever wrapped New England in 
perspiration was a bit of cool comfort compared to it. 
Fortunately, there were no lookers-on in Vienna to 
see our discomfiture. We did not learn until later 
that sunstroke is unknown in tliis climate, so that we 
were tortured by dread as well as discomfort; and 
two happier people than those who sat at last by the 
tub near the little spring in the vallc}-, ladling the 
cool water in handfuls over face and head, it would 
be hard to meet. 

One of the blessings which sometimes come in tlie 
guise of misfortunes, kept us in the valley some days 
longer than we had originally expected, and left us 
grow into a little closer acquaintance. It is madness 
to take so severe a trip as that required to get into 
the Yosemite, without staying there at least a week. 
Two or three days only to bask- in the delight of such 
a masterpiece of unearthly beauty and then tear one's 
self away from it for a possible forever, is too tanta- 
lizing for human nature to bear with anv sort of 
equanimity. Like Niagara, or other places of like 
magnificent proportion, it requires time to see things 
as they really are. It is impossible for days to believe 
that heights are as lofty, within hundreds of feet, as 
their actual dimensions. But day by day the stupen- 
dous sizes grow while you look at them, and if one 



128 ON THE WTNO. 

could only remain long enough to shake off outside 
ideas of distance, I really believe the summits cf those 
white climbing walls, bare and inaccessible, mounting 
into the still, blue air, would seem at last to reach 
heaven. 

We had the one day of a thousand in which to leave 
this haunting spot, a day so perfect that its very mem- 
ory is bliss. The large dewdrops v/cre still sliimmer- 
ing on the grass, for the sun rises on the heights 
hours before it strikes the narrow joath by the river 
below, and the shadows linger till late in the morning. 
We had a new driver, and a new team, chief of whom 
were Strawberries-an'-Cream, and Nicodemus, and the 
way, after one last, long, lingering look from Inspira- 
tion Point, and climbing the four miles to the summit 
beyond, we tore down those mountain passes, was 
almost too wild for comfort. We bounded in our 
seats like India rubber balls in the hands of an Eastern 
juggler; the wretched people inside were tossed and 
tumbled until they were bruised from head to foot; 
but, like the famous ride of Horace Greeley over 
some of these same slopes, our coachman was bound 
to get us there on time. " Old Dowse," the other 
driver, with six horses, was just ahead of us with five 
minutes' start; a stern chase is always a long one, 
but our man would have broken our necks and his 
own twenty times over before he would have been 
two minutes behind his "pard" in getting into port. 
It is not the first time we needed a special Provi- 
dence, and found it, but I trust it may be the last. 

We picked a couple of enormous pine cones, six- 



ON THE WING. J2(y 

teen or eighteen inches long, to take home for the 
babies, and would have liked to attempt one of the 
snow-plants, those beautiful spires of waxy carmine, 
in which leaf, stem and blossom is the same vivid, 
intense, transparent color, only that every one assured 
us it would be impossible to preserve it. Even if it 
were not, it would never be so beautiful again away 
from its proper resting-place, so that comforted us. 
At Clark's, twenty-five miles away, we made a detour 
to reach the big trees, and spent a memorable after- 
noon looking at those freaks of nature. A ball of 
twine, which you unwind for ninety or a hundred feet 
to measure one Grizzly Giant, Diakes you believe the 
size you can never understand otherwise. The driver 
points to a spot a few hundred yards at one side, 
where a hand's-breadth seems to have been cut in 
another enormous trunk, and tells you that it is 
Wawona, through which the coaches drive. It requires 
the full force of the solid fact that your twelve-pas- 
senger team with its four horses fits easily under the 
arch, even with the Big Boy on top, before you begin 
to realize that it is possible. To talk of trees thirty 
feet in diameter is one thing, to see them another. 
The tremendous disproportion between length and 
breadth, which makes them even when two hundred 
feet in height, look stumpy; the queer, straggling, ugly 
foliage, the peculiar color and formation of the three- 
foot-thick bark, combine to make them more objects of 
curiosity than things of beauty, especially in a country 
filled with the exquisite symmetry of the graceful 
yellow pine and white oak. 
9 



130 ON THE WING. 

They are named for individuals and states. We took 
off our hats with a Harvard " rah " to imposing old 
Massachusetts, and did the usual honors of the place 
in buying bark and bits of wood. They will do to 
trim the little house by the sea. 

From Clark's down to the valley fifty miles beyond, 
the beautiful wild flowers began again. Such exqui- 
site and delicate things I never saw before. There 
was one we called the Cashmere Lily for want of a 
better name, which had on the inside of its creamy 
petal's a spot of rich, deep coloring like the figure in 
an India shawl. We absolutely revelled in the fra- 
grance and exquisite perfection of these lovely un- 
known blooms, and for want of better uses, trimmed 
our old/coach until it looked like a marriage-bell. It 
was not until we struck the hot, dusty line of the 
lower plain that we really became roused to the dis- 
comfort of our situation. In and from the valley there 
were no longer those useful bits of printed paper 
inside Russia leather covers, to save us from discom- 
fort ; we had got out of the region where Raymond 
coupons took care of us, and were obliged to take 
care for ourselves. As a natural consequence we 
came to grief. I will not speak of our woes beyond 
one earnest appeal to those who v/ill come here after- 
Avard, to make assurance doubly sure that they are 
given a regular seat in a regular stage, not a place on 
an extra, nor one that obliges them to ride backward. 
They'll have to fight and they'll have to struggle, but 
they must insist; and for Heaven's sake let them not 
believe anybody, anybody^ even if they look like dea- 



ON THK WING. 131 

cons and have their hands on the Bible. Lying is as 
natural to California as gold mines. Or rather, we 
won't call it lying. The imagination of the people 
assumes the same proportions as everything else, and 
they make false statements without being conscious 
of it. 

Such a coach-load of draggled and dirty beings as 
alighted at that hot little inn at Madera never filled a 
stage before. We were copper-colored as Digger 
Indians; we were hot (the thermometer was at 116 
degrees) ; we were hungry ; we were filthy ; it would 
take keen eyes to recognize respectable people in 
such a group of tramps. What I have always be- 
lieved in regard to human nature, that it is equal 
to great things even when it fails in petty troubles, 
proved itself here. We conquered in the strife with 
weariness, and had, between opera singing, conun- 
drums and stories, a jolly day. If we had rested on 
our laurels long enough to have realized how miser- 
ably unhappy and unfortunate we were, we would have 
died decently rather than have kept up such a strug- 
gle : but New England grit, and a little Irish humor 
which always comes in as a forlorn hope, bridged us 
over. But if every discomfort had been increased an 
hundred-fold, if we had been jolted until our poor 
flesh were black and blue from head to foot, if we had 
been evaporated by heat until only enough mortal 
body was left to hold the soul, if we had been broken 
and bruised, pestered and tormented up to the farthest 
of human endurance, we would bear it all again will- 
ingly, joyfuU}-, eagerly, for one glimpse of that en- 



132 



ON THE WING. 



chanted valley, resting in its supernal beauty amid the 
solitude and silence of the everlasting hills. F'or 
aches shall pass, and dust and tribulation, but the 
memory of that exceeding loveliness will be part of 
our lives through all the days of all the years here- 
after. There is really no reason, however, why any- 
one not a confirmed invalid should not be able to make 
the trip with perfect ease, by simply arranging pro- 
perly at first. 

The regular coaches are exceedingly roomy and 
hung on good springs; both horses and drivers are 
used to their work and go at it earnestly ; their roads 
are excellently well kept, and clever pieces of engineer- 
ing skill ; there are good meals to be had on the way, 
and clean, comfortable resting-places; and anyone who 
dreads the first seventy-five miles of staging in one 
day, can divide it on the Madera route by stopping 
over night at Coarse-gold Gulch. If one takes no 
extra basrsfaofe to make care for themselves and dis- 
comfort for everybody else, beyond the indispensable 
shawl-strap or hand-satchel; if a light gossamer water- 
proof and rubbers are kept in a convenient pocket, 
whence they can be made available at a moment's 
notice ; if, above all, they carry with them that happy 
disposition to make the best of things and ignore 
trifles — without which no one should ever attempt to 
travel beyond a horse-car line — they can go to the 
Yosemite without any fear of consequences. There 
is neither undue fatigue nor dangerous excitement to 
be dreaded; exceeding care has reduced the chances, 
of accidents to the very smallest proportion ; and the 



ON THE WING. 



133 



beautiful, wonderful way which leads up through the 
mountains to the entrance of the valley, fills one with 
such ever-increasing delight as makes ordinary weari- 
ness unfelt. Especially in May, when the rainy season 
is not yet long enough over to make the country dusty 
or vegetation parched, and the melting snows on the 
mountain tops fill the great waterfalls with a mighty 
overflow, while neither great heat nor great cold are 
likely to torment the traveller, is the world at its best 
for making this excursion. But while the short season 
is available, no tourist should ever leave California 
without making a desperate effort to avail himself of 
the wonder and glory for all future time of seeing the 
Yosemite. It is like quitting London before one has 
stood within the shadowed aisles of Westminster, or 
coming back from Italy without having entered within 
the gates of the Eternal City. 

We slept in the berths of the palace-car, rather than 
in the hot rooms of the hotel — where we got never- 
theless an exceedingly good supper — and woke in the 
morning twenty miles away, with a delicious cool 
breeze blowing through the windows. 

Soon the Sacramento began to roll its muddy cur- 
rent by the side of the road ; long reaches of over- 
flowed meadow-land, with ruminant kine knee-deep in 
cool waters, and large, lovely white herons flapping on 
slow pinions over the trees, to their nests in the tall 
reeds, made the landscape picturesque to our unused 
eyes. On the opposite side, far away. Mount Diablo 
rose. Yellow lupin blossoms for the first time made 
the land beautiful. Indeed, the prevailing color of the 



134 ON THE WING. 

wild flowers through the whole of California is yellow, 
as if the golden treasure below painted with its own 
tint the delicate petals that lift themselves into the sun- 
shine above it. Among their roses, too, the Marechal 
Neil and Gold of Ophir transcend all the others in regal 
magnificence of size and beauty. We were obliged 
to put on warm wraps and shut out the draughts, so 
soon does this strange air change. We were nearing 
San Francisco. 



CHAPTER XL 

WITHIX THE GOLDEN GATE. 

THE same immensity which seems to pervade 
nature in Cahfornia, the amphtude of resource 
which bears visible fruit in the magnitude 
of her people's conceptions and ideas, shows itself 
down even to such small affairs as billheads and side- 
walk posters. The depot in Oakland, which is really 
the San Francisco terminus of the Central Pacific, 
coming either from the North or South, is one of these 
immense growtlis. For size, brightness, and airiness, 
it is a model structure; but I think the o^i2:antic car- 
toons upon its walls, the massive oil-paintings setting 
forth the superior virtues of Domestic sewing-machines 
or Clark's cotton, of this haberdasher, or that cigar- 
maker, impressed us more than the building itself. 
To see such a blooming waste of brilliant color and 
gorgeous framing expended on legitimate advertising 
rather took one's breath away. We had never seen 
its like before, except for the side-shows of a circus. 
To the traveller who comes across country by the 
direct overland route, and makes his debut, as it 
were, here, it must be even more startling, for we 
had become by this time accustomed to Californian 
idiosyncracies. 

I can easily imagine tlie approach to San Francisco 



136 ON THE WING. 

across the bay, a most beautiful one at certain seasons 
of the 3'ear. It is always impressive, as a great city 
set on hills and surrounded by water must ever be ; 
])ut when the welcome rains have brought with them 
verdure and bloom, so that the lovely world is new- 
born to its birtliright of fresher loveliness, it must be 
a rare sight. When one comes from the desperate 
cold of an Eastern winter, and crossing the I-lockies 
between walls of snow fifteen or twenty feet deep, 
comes into this land of flowers, and steams across the 
waters of the Pacific to the gates of this golden city, 
it must be like entering paradise. Just now, it is more 
like purgatory. Although only two months of the dry- 
season are over, the hills are gray, the streets windy 
and forlorn, whirlwinds of dust rush and rise at every 
corner, and the first aspect is almost one of desola- 
tion. Unconsciously, the Eastern mind makes San 
Francisco the representative of California. It absorbs 
its interests, it upholds its pride, it is the blossom of 
its civilization, just as Rome is of Italy or Paris of 
France. Unconsciously, also, people who are not old 
travellers measure that part of the world in which 
the}' happen to find themselves, by home standards. 
Remembering the glory of June in New-England, its 
sweetness, its beauty, its tenderness of unfolding life; 
remembering, too, the dreams we have dreamed, and 
stories we have heard, of the opulent wealth of this 
Western land, the first feeling is one of unreasoning 
disappointment. You are ready to be charmed, and 
find yourself chilled instead. Although in a vague 
way you liave heard before that there are such things 



ON THE WING. 137 

as drawbacks of climate and want of finish, imagina- 
tion, working with what it had to feed on in lower 
California, has built up a world of its own and resents 
the levelling processes of sober fact. It insists on 
this being the culminating point. 

The city is the most tantalizing of all we have yet 
■"struck," according to the Western phrase. Its people 
regard it with such an absorbing love, and the Eastern- 
ers who have lived in it for any time acquire such 
devotion for it, that one expects to be fascinated at 
the first glance. But one most decidedly is not. All 
that you have heard or read of the glorious climate of 
California, the poetic imagery that clings about the 
Golden Gate, the fabulous stories of wealth and splen- 
dor, the songs of Joaquin Miller and the sketches of 
Bret Hartfe, clusters about this spot before you reach 
it, as the Mecca of the Forty-niners. But when you 
come, tired and dust}^ from the long overland ride, 
across the Oakland ferry, and land at the foot of 
Market street, in a world that seems more dusty than 
ever; when you see the queer conglomeration of 
splendor and smallness in even the principal thorough- 
fares ; when your eyes are greeted wherever they turn 
by the outlying sand-hills, whose shifting favors are 
momently sifted over the entire city, you begin to 
hesitate, and she who hesitates is lost. When, added 
to this, you find that the gorgeous sunshine of which 
you have been told so much does not put in an appear- 
ance for three days running; that a fog, thick enough 
to cut in shoes and send away by Wells & Fargo's 
omnipresent express, drifts in every day and all day 



138 ON THE WING. 

long ; that you must wear your winter furs and thickest 
flannels in June, while your pretty fluffy muslins and 
light ribbons are remanded to the darkness and crush- 
ing of the trunk; that your crimps straighten out in 
the most deplorable fashion, and you have to put up 
an umbrella to save your hat ; that gritty whirlwinds 
of sand get into hair, eyes and mouth, till you feel 
like a nutmeg-grater, while in spite of all this you are 
required to indorse the pretty fiction that the world is 
just as it should be, and this ridiculous city the very 
choice gem of it, why, it's simply too much. 

You rage and storm for awhile ; you sigh over your 
best black satin, ruined after a week's promenading; 
you sneer at the women in the streets wearing seal- 
skin sacques down to their ankles and white summer 
hats at the same time; you ridicule the "bits" which 
take the place of honest quarter and half dollars ; the 
enormous size of everything, from the Palace Hotel 
to the sidewalk advertisements ; the planked streets 
and universal bay-windows; the quantity of jig-sawing 
which shocks your aesthetic principles by its lavish 
out-door application. A few of the bonanza kings are 
pointed out, men shown to the world by the fierce 
light which beats upon a throne upheld by millions, 
and you sneer more than ever. Better the dinner of 
herbs a thousand times than such a feast of stalled 
ox as this. 

But at last, one comparatively fine morning you get 
on the dummy to ride up California street, and yf)u 
experience a change of heat, swift, sudden and lasting. 
The little quiet monster that whisks you up and pulls 



ON THE WING. 1 39 

you clown the perpendicular hills, with a sudden a-rial 
flight like an elevator, may have something to do witli 
your conversion; the brilliant glow of sunshine falling 
on Mt. Diablo and the blue waters ebbinir throuirh the 
Golden Gate have more. You pass the wonderful 
houses with mosques and minarets, with conservatories 
and porte-cocheres, with stone garden-walls that cost a 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with that gorgeous 
air of having been built regardless of everything save a 
certain mammoth desire for comfort and luxury which 
never struck your conservative New England senses 
before. You pass other houses, by scores and hun- 
dreds, wonderful, too, in a different way, for the air of 
brightness and perfume of the glowing little beds of 
flowers around the small tenement, and the general 
well-to-do effect it gives the places. You hear that at 
Christmas time, when the cold is pinching the soul 
through the body by the Eastern sea, the same flowers 
will be blooming in the same gardens, and tlie air will 
be just what it is to-day, and no more ; with the added 
luxury of a daily rain to allay the indomitable dust. 
You drive out to the pretty park and find that the 
strange nondescript pavements let your carriage roll 
easily ; that the city has a conservatory which palsies 
your iDreconceived ideas of magnificence ; that the 
fight between mind and matter is going on indefatiga- 
bly and unceasingly, so that every day sees an inch or 
two more of sand-waste reclaimed from the desert and 
made to blossom like the rose — and so from melting 
somewhat along the edges, you begin to thaw entirely. 
By-and-by you begin to meet the peo])le, — the heart- 



140 ON THE WING. 

whole, generous people, who take your hand with a 
grip that means something, and put themselves and 
their treasures at your feet with a remnant of the 
old Spanish courtesy which made the days of Cas- 
tilian chivalry so delightful. You find parlors filled 
with as perfect and exquisite taste as any of the dear 
Queen Anne houses of the Eastern empire^ ; you find 
pictures whose reputation has reached other lands, 
and young people refined and well-bred, witli what- 
ever grace culture can lend to the means which make 
culture useful. Over and over again you are sur- 
prised and delighted at the difference between interior 
and exterior life, as the prickly burr of the chestnut 
hides the sweet meat within. It is the old story of 
Beauty and the Beast; you have only to wait a little, 
and look wiih kindly, unbiassed eyes, to find the fairy 
prince under the coarse husk of many an unprepos- 
sessing personnel. 

But the perverse climate, which is the bane of the 
town at this time of year, puts to flight any desire to 
yield entirely to the seductions of the spot. After 
the few morning hours, there is a chilliness constantly 
in the air, modelled on the worst form of the east 
winds which are our bane at home. The fog, which 
would be called fine rain in any other place where 
good English was spoken, is of almost daily occur- 
rence ; and the change between the sunny and shady 
side of tlie street, at the same instant of time, is some- 
thing truly western in dimensions. Besides, you don't 
believe, and don't want to believe, in a country where 
a woman cannot add to her armory of legitimate 



ON THE WING. 141 

v/eapons such telling and trenchant properties as sum- 
mer dresses, airy, fresh and elegant. Think of having 
no change of base, but fighting it out on a winter 
line all summer. What chance is there for a glorious 
campaign under such conditions ? 

We have had as yet in this first week only a pre- 
liminary or bird's-eye view. It will take much longer 
time to develop the real state of things here, and how 
it compares with those of other places. The trouble 
is, in short trips, that one rarely gets beyond the simple 
first glance. It is like standing on a mountain side; 
distance hides all the lesser inequalities and makes 
the world look as if on a dead level. Just as in meet- 
ing human acquaintances, all the little individualities 
come out afterward. 

Once you have driven through the Golden Gate Park 
on the way to the Cliff House, and seen the manner 
in which the pushing sand-hills toss and tumble up 
from the sea, whelming trees and flowers in their way, 
you will never again Avonder that they have so much 
dust in San Francisco ; the surprise will be that they 
have so little, for the entire place is built on a sand- 
bank. It is almost a miracle to see the masses of 
fragrant yellow lupin, which is their first agent in 
reclaiming this shifting waste, striking root and bear- 
ing briUiant spikes of blossoms and luxuriant foliage 
on so frail a foundation. It looks as if at any moment, 
like a scene at a theatre, it might be pushed' out of 
sight and the wild ocean claim its own again. 

This park proves conclusively, like the Archbishop's 
garden at Santa Fd, what an adequate system of 



142 ON THE WING. 

watering could do for the rest of the city. It is placed 
in the most desperately barren spot of all, where the 
yellow sand is blown in huge billows, and threatens to 
overl^ow everything; yet patienee, and time, and pure 
water, three of the best things in God's world, and 
most easily in every one's reach, have made the spot 
in a couple of years green as an emerald and a real 
delight to the eyes. We could not help wishing that 
some time or other a Crystal Palace, some miniature 
edition of their beautiful conservatory, might make 
our own Royal Pleasure Garden complete by giving 
us a bit of briohtness in winter-time. These Califor- 
nian people do not need conservatories. The poorest 
of them is a nabob in the matter of flowers. Along 
the street, men and boys by the dozen offer you huge 
bouquets of jacqueminots or great bunches of assorted 
flowers for ten cents ; in the bits of gardens outside 
every house, there are blossoms the whole year round, 
and the passer-by can feast his senses on perfume and 
brightness from New Year's day to Christmas. But 
here, where for five or six months we have the harsh- 
ness of winter outside, with no atom of color to relieve 
. the gray or white monotone, how more than delicious it 
would be to step \vithin transparent walls and welcome 
the bloom of summer back again. Now that the 
dear little city is stretching her arms upward and 
outward in search of jewels to adorn her, why doesn't 
some one of her generous children celebrate his 
loving remembrance by a perpetual fellowshij^ of 
flowers ? It would be better than all the windows in 
Memorial Hall. 



ON THE WING. I 43 

The longer one sta}s here the longer one wants 
to stav. By the time a second week is passing, one 
begins to see something of the inner life and motive 
which causes much of the outer expression. For 
instance, the absurdity, as it seems in the tirst place, 
of building these elegant mansions, veritable Chateaux 
en Espagne, of wood, is explained by the extreme 
difficulty of procuring stone, and still more by the 
always present dread of earthquakes. Although the 
people profess to laugh at these little climatic outbursts 
of fever and ague, there is still deep down in their 
hearts a nervous and unexpressed dread of what may 
happen. They say, and truly, that lightning kills 
more people in one year in the East, than their earth- 
quakes have, all massed together, since time immemo- 
rial ; but that does not get rid of the fact, that any- 
time of any 3-ear one single tremendous shake may 
bring with it a sweeping storm of destruction. Every- 
one who has ever felt even the slightest' shock agrees 
in declaring that the helpless horror of the situation 
is beyond that caused by any other natural agent; 
and even men used to similar manifestations all their 
lives, turn pale at each new^ one. The question of 
expense, which seems naturally to be a secondary one 
in this land of magnificent fortunes, yet holds for 
something, when a palace that has cost half a million, 
in its present material, would mount to three millions 
in more substantial form. There must be a limit; 
and, though the air is thick with fortunes of thousands 
and hundreds of thousands, still millions do not hang 
on every bush even in California. 



CHAPTER XII. 

SOME OF THE WITCHERIES OF CALIFORNIA. 

THE three or four days we spent at Monterey, 
while still having our headquarters at San 
Francisco, made altogether the pleasantest 
memory we had of California. The place itself is 
hard to classify, because of its exceeding loveliness. 
We have nothing at home that approaches the ex- 
quisite setting of this exquisite house, a summer hotel 
prettier even than the Montezuma at Las Vegas, and 
in an adorable spot, so far as nature is concerned. 
The pretty, quaint old town lying near by, on the 
shore of a quiet harbor, makes an admirable site for 
research, amid its adobe houses and ruined missions; 
but it is the Del Monte hotel particularly which has 
become now an objective point for tourists. The 
Pacific, all along this coast, wears constantly that 
dazzling sapphire blue which we see atjiome only at 
special times; the sky carries out the same superb 
color with a glow and depth of sunshine super-added, 
which is almost too brilliant for belief; and a series of 
curving beaches of shining, snowy, white sand, are 
covered here and there, even down to the water's 
edge, by a growth of the most picturesque trees on 
this continent. These arc a species of flat-topped, 
sombre-leaved cypresses, with gnarled and twisted 
lo 



146 ON THE WING. 

trunks, bent into all sorts of impossible shapes, making- 
the most weird and striking picture, and compensating 
in their dense shadows for the glowing beauty of sea 
and sky beyond. They are, I believe, unique to this 
locality, and remind one constantly of those weird 
cedars of the Roman Campagna, which Inness is so 
fond of introducing in his Italian pictures. They give 
an essentially foreign aspect to this locality. Across 
the water, showing in faint purple outline against 
the horizon, a beautiful mountain range melts into the 
distance, w^hile between skim white-sailed boats, or 
dim, shadowy ships glide just indicated on the farthest 
edge. Coming nearer the house, one enters a grove 
of live oaks and pines intermixed, bent by the fierce 
northwesters into the wildest and most frenzied forms, 
as if the dryads occupying them had been tortured 
by remorse ; under these, winding paths run here and 
there, bordered by emerald lawns which near the 
house blossom into brilliant flower-beds of the most 
magnificent and profuse kind. In one place a cactus 
garden shows every variety of these diabolical forms, 
fascinating in their repulsiveness as the devil fishes so 
many of them resemble, and gorgeous with a tropical 
luxuriance of blossoms. A corps of forty gardeners 
are busy winter and summer in this beautiful place, 
and the results are worthy the labor devoted to it. 
Some of the wild gardens, with hedges of foxgloves 
ten feet high and every color of the rainbov/, and 
clusters of roses of such magnificence and regal ampli- 
tude, that they look hardly natural, make it seem as 
if somewhere within those tangled bowers the sleep- 



ON THE WING. 147- 

ing beauty might still be held in magic thrall, sur- 
rounded by her bewitched court. It would have to be 
a very royal young prince indeed, who could ever 
make up to her for breaking such a delicious slumber. 
The house in the midst of this fairyland is worthy 
the situation. A mass of towers and deliciously- 
planned corners and angles, with broad piazzas and 
shaded porches, it rises by terraces of steps from its 
enchanted wilderness of flowers like another bit of 
enchantment. It is beyond all cavil or comparison 
the prettiest bit of architecture, and the most com- 
plete in its internal arrangement, we have seen in these 
months of varied wandering. The service in the 
dining-room is a miracle for swnftness and polite atten- 
tion. We had grown so used to plate-hurling and 
table-tossing, to waiting an hour for an order, to hav- 
ing cold dishes and uncalled-for dishes set clownishly 
before us, and to taking them meekly, glad of any- 
thing from such imperious bunglers as the ordinary 
hotel-waiters of the Western country, that it seemed 
like reaching a haven of rest and peace to sit down 
and have a well-bred attendant satisfy quietly and 
quickly every wish of the heart. Even the Palace 
Hotel, with its well-trained corps of assistants and 
elaborate cuisine, cannot compete in anything but 
waffles with this beloved inn. The Palace waffles are 
things to dream of. Within its limited list of luxu- 
ries everything is well cooked, and sent to the table 
as hot — well, as hot as hot — and that is one of the 
first essentials for perfection. The Palace is of such 
tremendous proportions that even if a waiter takes 



148 ON THE WING. 

your portion out of a fiery furnace, it has left all its 
glow behind before it reaches you. It is nobody's 
fault, and yet your innocent stomach suffers. Within 
easy distance, the most beautiful drives imaginable 
are to be found, and remarkably good horses and 
carriages to reach them. Groves, cliffs, beaches strewn 
with the great shells of the Abalone, lined with 
gleaming mother-of-pearl, Chinese fishing-villages 
with their picturesque collection of huts and people, 
ruined walls of adobe and quiet little half-Spanish vil- 
lages, are within easy reach. The beautiful Santa 
Clara valley, fertile and fair, stretches away to the 
north, dotted with such pleasant towns as San Jose, 
Memlo Park and other pretty spots, while San Fran- 
cisco itself is but three hours and a half away — for 
we are learning now to measure distance by minutes 
instead of miles. 

I wish the dear people who are at the helm of our 
different eastern seaside resorts this 'summer would 
take a telegraphic trip here before the house closes, 
and carryback a mental inventory of luxuries for next 
season's campaign. The idea of Boston people being 
outdone by anything so Western as the Pacific coast, 
the very jumping-off place of creation ! I won't ask 
them to take home the warm sea-water tanks under 
their crystal roofs, with the esplanade of waving palms 
and greenery throwing their soft quivering shadows 
on the bathers, for we have not the long Western 
purses which can afford to pay $75,000 for such a lux- 
urious whim. But the glass-covered piazzas, where 
the sun makes summer even out of a winter dav, 



ON THE WING. 1 49 

Avith every rude wind shut out, and only sweet sights 
and sounds within reach of eyes and ears — that they 
might take ; and the tiled fireplaces full of blazing 
logs; and the exquisite little rooms with their Turk- 
ish rugs, lovely enough to have come this moment out 
of Pray's window; and the parlor with its Steinway 
grand; and the garden protected by hedges and ram- 
parts. Why cannot they make a Monterey by the 
Atlantic ? 

Returning to San Francisco, I must do the people 
the simple justice to say that our Eastern notions of 
their peculiarities are entirely and unwarrantably ex- 
travagant. The nouveaux riches at home have quite 
as much vulgarity and shoddiness and loudness, with 
a finical narrowness in the way of flaunting their 
pretensions in the face and eyes of the populace, 
Avhich the larger-hearted and freer-handed Westerner 
never acquires. The few houses with which person- 
ally I had the pleasure of being familiar were exquisite 
in refinement and good taste, with a fine flavor of 
heartiness thrown in that is too often wanting in our 
more thin-blooded civilization. The)- were filled with 
a generous amplitude of comfort and luxury, both in 
furnishing and dimension, that our showy modern 
architecture would never admit. They made many of 
us doubt whether even in building, 

"the reign of good Queen Anne 
Was culture's palmiest day." 

From hallway to bath-room, from fireplace to frieze, 
there was a largeness as attractive as unusual. The 
young people who swarm through them, for there is 



ICO ON THE WING. 

an old world sentiment in favor of large families which 
does credit to the head and heart, were well-educated, 
well-bred, and fascinating in that delicate fragrance of 
modesty and unassuming simplicity which is to youth 
what perfume is to the flower. Within a few years 
their home educational institutions have made im- 
mense strides. There will soon be small need of 
sending boys to Harvard or girls to New York board- 
ing-schools. I saw in the lare^e halls of the colle2:e 
of St. Ignatius, one of the finest sets of apparatus in 
chemistry and physics 1 ever found in any place, 
fining class-room after class-room with the best appli- 
ances of modern art ; and at the annual exhibition of 
one of the private schools, we found a collection of 
young girls, who, for talent, for sweetness, and for 
perfect simplicity of dress and character, might have 
borne away the palm from our darling ones at home. 
The increasing tendency to display in our Boston 
exhibitions has been a sore blow to many of us now 
for years. But how could any girl, with a girl's intui- 
tive love for purity and refinement, be near the beloved 
woman who is tlie soul of that San Francisco scliool, 
and not become permeated for life with all good influ- 
ences ? One of the dearest wishes of my life would be 
fulfilled if my little Happy-Heart could be near her. 

It is a sincere pleasure to be able to take home this 
remembrance of tlie city. We have had for years 
such a distorted picture of the social relations of the 
place in our mind's eye, that this glimpse of its real 
condition is comforting. Not that there is not plenty 
of room for improvement ; any city as cosmopolitan 



ON THE WING. 



151 



in its tendencies as this, must enclose an immense 
mixture of good and evil. But the Eastern humani- 
tarians who so zealously ignore the beam in their own 
eyes, while pointing out the motes in the moral iris of 
San Francisco, had better call on an oculist l)efore 
going any farther. It is a pitv to spoil such a number 
of the pretty little on-dits of polite society by doubting- 
their veracity ; but I think the day is fast v/aning that 
could give us stories of Airs. JMackay and others of 
her class desiring to buy the Arc de Triomphe. Even 
Avithout that reticence which comes Avith the habit of 
riches, there is too good an understanding of their 
own place and dignity to admit of such faux pas now ; 
and, as a simple matter of justice, I do n't know why 
we should pet our self-made men and women at home, 
and sneer at them in San Francisco. 

In a place of such magnificent proportions as this, 
two weeks or three, is only an aggravation as a limit of 
time. The Chinese quarter alone would occupy half 
of it, in its bewildering novelty. A stranger's steps 
turn as instinctively toward this queer precinct here» 
as tliey would toward the Louvre at Paris. Per- 
haps, if I said toward Bon Marche, it would be a 
better simile, for candor compels me to admit that 
there is quite as much enthusiasm expended on the 
cheap bargains as the priceless pictures, by the ma- 
jority of i^eople who see " Yurrup." By the time you 
have travelled with a detective through tlie by-ways, 
you want to try the highways alone. Tlie strange 
little atoms of shops, with their clumsily-piled treas- 
ures of crapes, and carvings, and pottery, are like an 



ic;2 ON THE WING. 

oriental bazaar. They look as if they held nothing; 
and, lo ! they contain all that heart can desire. The 
most wonderful crapes, the most dehcate embroideries, 
the most delicious monsters in china and bronze, come 
out, as if by magic, from the walls, the floor, or the 
ceiling. China, bamboo, curios and fantastics, per- 
fumes and paints, nothing seems impossible to get in 
these dark little dens, if you are only ready to pay. 
And wJieii you have paid, then never lose sight of 
your bundle until it is safe in your possession. They 
have a habit of forgetfulness, an absent-minded way 
of dropping two or three small articles out of your 
purchases and letting it escape their recollection, 
which is trvino^ to one of business habits. But make 
a note of the items, and don't let it elude your re- 
tentive memory, and you can floor the almond-eyed 
Celestial every time. And never give by any chance 
more than two-thirds of the price first asked. The 
more you succeed in shaving a Chinaman, the more 
respect he has for your race ; so you owe it to civil- 
ization to uphold its standard. 

If you e-\'er find yourself in one of the streets which 
belong to this people, turn in at the first chop-house 
vou meet ; climl) one or two flights of stairs, until you 
come to the uppermost rooms; choose a stool of 
carved ebony from the pile at one side ; sit down at a 
small round table of polished teak w^ood and look 
about you. Tliere will probably be lanterns of a 
gorgeousncss you never before dreamed oi hanging 
from the roof, and screens and banners brilliant and 
dazzling on the walls ; there will be glass cases filled 



ON THE WING. 153 

with impossible figures, and glowing flowers here and 
there ; there will be a crowd of chattering Chinese, 
some Mandarins with the precious red button on top 
of the small silk cap, some immensely effective in 
brocaded trousers of a richne'ss that makes your un- 
accustomed eyes weak, and some common peo})le like 
yourself. Take all this in, and then ask for tea. Ye 
gods ! such tea ! such nectar as you will never know 
again. They put a pinch of dry leaves into a tiny 
cup; they pour boiling water in and cover with a little 
saucer; in a moment they pour off this effusion into 
still tinier cups like those of a child's tea-set ; they 
offer 3'ou sugar if 3-ou desire, but no milk, and everv 
few moments your copper-colored Ganymede comes 
with a kettle of his own tint and pours on more water; 
yet the last cup is better than the first. With it they 
give you little decorated saucers of preserved ginger, of 
baked almonds, of limes conserved in sugar, of fanciful 
cakes made of nut-paste covered with brilliant frosting, 
of strange-looking rice squares, and last, but not least, 
a pair of chop-sticks, which, if you are a wise woman, 
you will not try to tackle. The airy and easy way in 
wdiich your convives use them may deceive you, but 
don't attempt to copy; be original, and let them 
severely alone ; and for all this dissipation you will 
pay two bits, the value of which you probably know 
by this time, but for fear that you don't, I will whisper 
— twenty-five cents. 

You will go to the Chinese theatre, of course, but 
you wmII not stay there. Of all the grotesque, dis- 
cordant, bombastic, infernal, inhuman tortures the 



154 ON THE WING. 

barbaric mind ever conceived, this is foremost. No 
wonder an ordinary play lasts six months in the pre- 
sentation, when between every word an actor speaks 
there is a pause to allow the orchestra of three to 
clash cymbals, and roll drums, and squeak a two- 
stringed fiddle with a triangle hanging from it. The 
orator wades through part of his sentence in this man- 
ner, swaggers behind the stage to rest, comes out at 
the other side, takes up the broken thread of his 
discourse, gets tired, goes in again, and so on, ad 
nauseam. As among the ancient Greeks, women are 
not allowed upon the stage, young men filling their 
parts, with brilliantly-painted cheeks, gorgeously em- 
broidered silken robes, and the most harrowing, un- 
natural, shrieking falsetto voices imaginable. As a 
sort of protest of race, I suppose, men in the audi- 
ence wore their hats, while every one in the women's 
gallery went bareheaded, with hair dressed after the 
fashion with which pictures have long made us famihar. 
The hideously dreadful noise of brass and tin never 
ceases, except for a second at a time, and the patient, 
sad-eyed crowd, sitting quiet and motionless, filling 
every inch of floor and gallery, look on with grave 
satisfaction. There is no applause and no animation, 
but an absorbed interest in what is going on, which 
must be a comfort to the shrieking actors if the pan- 
demonium about allows them to notice it. Ten minutes 
were all our weak tympani could bear; but here the 
motionless crowd sat for hours without any feeling 
but delight. In spite of the most painful attention to 
look and gesture, in order to get. if possible, an ink- 



ON THE WING. 1 55 

ling of the plot, we were obliged to give up in despair. 
Every sentence was delivered with the same terrific 
force and exaggeration of action, so that the declama- 
tion was one dead level of noise and fury. 

The opium dens and gambling saloons we left alone. 
Seeing men make brutes or fools of themselves did 
not enter into our ideas of a holiday ; but those who 
investigated thought them of interest. The water 
trips to Saucelito, San Rafael and San Ouentin, gave us 
beautiful glimpses of what seemed the most beautiful 
harbor in the world. The water had always the same 
deep green color, that looked unreal to eyes accus- 
tomed to the blue Atlantic ; the rounded, wooded 
islands and promontories made a succession of de- 
lightful views; the city climbing its terraced sand- 
hills was always in sight as a bit of life, and the 
mountain ranges melting in the distance made the 
farther shore beautiful, with its white villages nestling 
in the shadow of the hills. 

Then there were the Twin Peaks and the Cliff 
House, the Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, the 
Diamond Palace and the Shot Tower, the Fire Patrol 
and Ichi Ban. The cable roads themselves, are enough 
attraction for any one city. We saw tliem in Chicago, 
but without being at all impressed. To see a car and 
dummy going on a level plain was so like common 
railroading that even the absence of steam failed 
to make it unusual. But here, w^here they go rushing 
up and tumbling down the frightfully steep sand-hills, 
which, like perpendicular terraces, surround the city 
on almost every side, they become one of the wonders 



156 ON THE WING. 

of the world. A single lever-like handle projecting 
perpendicularly from the centre of an open car is the 
only visible machinery. A jerk to this side or that, 
propels two cars up the side of the steepest ascent, 
or stops it in the midst of an incline that leaves one 
almost in mid-air. I find copied in the Big Boy's 
diary a Chinaman's description of this motive power, 
which is so concisely vivid, that I copy it here, in 
spite of its slight Western flavor of profanity, which 
is as natural to this soil as its monstrous squash and 
gigantic beets, and almost as innocent : " No pushee ! 
no pullee ! go like hellee," was the gentle barbarian's 
formula, and it is the simple truth. It is very like 
witchcraft, and the unfortunate creature who invented 
it would have been burned at the stake by any 
respectable deacon in Salem, if he had only lived 
there two hundred or so years ago. But the times 
change, and we with them. Now we put money in 
our wise men's purses, and send them to Congress, 
when they achieve some new triumph of diabolical 
art. In spite of the cold, cold winds, in spite of the 
whirling sand and pelting fog, the outside seats on the 
dummy, which is not unlike our open car, are always 
full, even when the covered car behind is empty. 
There seems to be a fascination about them, though 
1 can well believe what a medical man says, that con- 
sumption and lung diseases have increased largely 
since their advent. It would be too dangerous a 
pastime for clear Boston, even if it were feasible there. 
The infinite length of the business streets is crowded 
with shops of all kinds, not of quite such tremendous 



ON THE \VIN(;. 



157 



proportions as our representative Eastern houses 
assume, but of immense resources. In a small jewel 
shop on Montgomery street, we saw the proprietor 
showing a party some regal ornaments, a feather of 
diamonds for the hair, worth |; 14,000, and a close 
necklace at 140,000, One would imagine, from the 
lavish number of precious stones at each hand's turn 
on the street, that every one dabbles in stocks and 
puts his great profits into diamonds for his wife and 
daughter; for, of course, they all make great profits, or 
they wouldn't keep on dabbling. 

If private and public report is to be believed, almost 
every one in the country, Avithout regard to age, sex, 
or position, does more or less in the way of irregular 
stock-broking. The lady speculates with her pin- 
money ; the servant, with her wages ; the business 
man, with his income ; the mechanic, with his hard- 
earned dollars; the bootblack, with the "bits" he 
makes on his "shines." The air is full of legends of 
the tremendous fortunes made by some chance turn of 
the w'heel, now and again ; a feverish anxiety to be in 
the lists, with the chance of some time or other bear- 
ing off a prize, possesses the communitv, and makes 
the market from which unprincipled men gather their 
harvest. The very uncertainty attending speculation 
becomes one of the elements of fascination, and only 
heightens the excitement of the chase. They bear 
disappointment as an Englishman bears defeat, — 
never know when they are beaten, and are ready to go 
into the struggle again, hammer and tongs, as soon as 
they recover breath. They may be "dead-broke," 



158 ON THE WING. 

*' cleaned-out," " busted " ; but they are never too far 
gone to stake their next dollar on the chance of 
"striking it rich this time." They are wonderful 
people. Other men would go mad over so many dis- 
appointments, but the good Californian thrives on it. 
They believe in "luck," as honestly as the Irish 
believe in fairies ; and, in the deepest depths of pecu- 
niary difficulty, when the fair bubble which dazzled 
them before has melted into thin air, they follow some 
new chimera, certain that this time, at least, Fortune, 
which has been "down" on them so long, will smile, 
aud crown them with her golden laurels. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE ECCENTRICITII'IS OF CALIFORNIA. 

TO the stranger who enters the California about 
San Francisco, at this time of the year, it is a 
world of wonders ; everything goes by con- 
traries. One comes to the city to get cold, and goes to 
the country to get w^arm. ' The fields which are seen 
from the summits of the Twin Peaks, lying barren and 
bleak in the July sunshine, are clad in verdure and 
filled with lavish profusion of growth in midwinter. 
Farmers send their cattle to pasture in January, while 
they herd them in barns and feed on hay or grain 
in June. The usual sequences of life seem to be 
^thoroughly upset, and one is constantly amazed at the 
series of surprises. Even on the vexed Chinese ques- 
tion there is an absolute opposition between fact and 
sentiment. Hatred of the Chinese is the one point 
on which all Cahfornians. good, bad or indifferent, 
agree. There is no doubt or cavil in the Western 
mind when one asks an opinion in this regard. Abso- 
lute distrust or dislike colors all their dealings, and 
they speak with bitter scorn of the Eastern people, 
who, knowing nothing of the curse fastened upon 
them, still dare to talk and legislate in favor of its 
continuance. It is in vain to point out what in- 
estimable help the Chinese have given, and are giving, 



l6o ON THE WING. 

in public works which white labor could never accom- 
plish, in building railroads or canals, and in scores of 
other ways ; that simply counts for nothing. They 
are looked upon with an aversion, compared with 
which all other antagonisms of race seem paltry. It 
is a war of religious prejudice as Avell as political 
difference. In the palmiest days of abolition tumult, 
the negro was never so wofully under the ban, as these 
helots of the far East are now on the western coast of 
America ; yet, in spite of all this fury of scorn, in 
spite of this intense hatred which hardly stoops to 
reason with an inquirer, in spite of clamor and dis- 
affection, they continue to employ the people they 
revile, and by so doing give them, day by day, stronger 
foothold in their towns and cities. They hold indig' 
nation meetings to prove that the Chinese laundrymen 
are driving out home labor ; that the Chinese kitchen- 
gardens have undermined an industry which in other 
states supports thousands of citizens and their fami- 
lies in prosperity; that the Chinese habits of over- 
crowding, and their phenomenal simplicity of diet, 
enable them to force all other laborers from the 
market by the infinitesimal amount upon which they 
can support hfe, — and there the matter ends. The 
very people who cry out most loudly, the very lower 
class who are being driven to the wall by this tre- 
mendous competition, employ Chinese washerwomen 
because they do their work for quarter the price; 
buy Chinese-raised vegetables because they can get 
them for a cent less in the pound ; purchase under- 
clothes of Chinese peddlers, and tea at Chinese ware- 



ON TtIK WING. l6l 

houses for the same short-sighted reason. Rich men 
rent houses to the authorities of the Six Companies, 
knowing that they are to be used in open disregard 
of law and order, crowded to rei)ulsiveness, swarmed 
with humanity, until the number in each tenement 
is beyond belief. The law makes edicts to insure a 
certain amount of air and light to every adult within 
the city walls, and then closes its eyes, while twenty 
thousand Chinese live in quarters that would not 
shelter two thousand white people. The simple en- 
forcement of the act regulating the number of cubic 
feet of air required for each person within the city, 
would drive three-quarters of the race to-morrow out- 
side the limits of legislation. They could not begin 
to pay ordinary rates of rent, unless they charged or- 
dinary rates for labor ; and once they place themselves 
on an even footing in regard to expense, their doom is 
sealed. This namby-pamby trifling with a question 
concerning which they pretend such alarm, is not in 
keeping with the usual clear-headed, energetic action 
of Western people ; it makes one suspect some hidden 
reason for tolerating a pet grievance for the sake of 
railinf^ at it. If San Francisco really believes what it 
sa)S about the danger of harboring this race, why do 
they not use the simple, legitimate means at their dis- 
posal ? I cannot conceive Boston or New York, with 
a similar belief, tolerating any such internecine policy 
for a day ; and I cannot conceive Californians in 
earnest in their cry of "the Chinese m.ust go," when 
they take so little pains to protect themselves. To 
take all the Chinaman has to give, and then curse him 



162 ox VHV. \VIN(i. 

for letting it be taken, is rather a superficial way of 
settling a difficulty. 

In a city where people with one or two millions 
seem to l^e as common as those with as many hundred 
thousands in other corporations, and where local pride 
and affection run so high, it is a pity some large, 
generous, rational plan cannot be devised for irrigation, 
and properly carried out. With plenty of water to lay 
the dust in the streets and cover the shifting sand-hills 
beyond with verdure, the first immense stride would 
1 e made in improvement. With shade trees lining 
tliose beautiful wide avenues, and filling in the open 
corner spaces which come so often where three streets 
meet, San Francisco would be a joy to look at in sum- 
mer time, just as all agree it is iii winter. If, in 
addition to this, the swift-climbing hills which rise 
from tlie water on every side were laid out in terraces, 
I tliink it would be one of the most beautiful cities in 
the new world. The exquisite bay, with its islands 
and dusky background of foot-hills climbing and fading 
all around the horizon; the fine outline of Mt. Diablo, 
as it shows in the distance; the ever-present beauty 
of flowers adding its graciousness to out-door life, and 
the pleasant impression of comfort which so many 
pretty small houses make, interspersed with palatial 
larger ones, give all the requisites for great beauty. 
It has everything needful but water. Out in the 
suburbs, the country is green as a garden, where 
windmills are employed extensively to irrigate from 
artesian wells or from ditches brought down from the 
mountains beyond. I counted from tlie car-window, as 



ON IHE WING. 163 

we Stopped for a moment one clay at Valencia street, 
tliirty-six of these enormous whirligigs turning slowly 
in the languid air, and giving a Dutch aspect to the 
M'hole country-side they were in, with its small houses 
and beautifully cared-for market gardens. 

If we were older travellers, who could take the 
goods the gods provide, and never pause to think of 
any other; or, if we had come fresh from the inclem- 
ency of a New England winter, there would be more 
wonderment and more love for this golden land which 
puzzles while it pleases us. It would be like the 
beginning of new life. We would see only the beauty 
and such little stings as sharper air or an e very-day 
fog-bank would be trifles beneath notice. But now 
one has all the memories of the loveliness at home to 
contend with. We know that balmy air and singing 
birds, daisies and buttercups, the universal freshness 
of youthful nature, are abroad on the hills and fields 
of June, so that the sharp atmosphere and clinging 
mist, the dust and imperfection here, is more than ever 
trying. Especially when in conservatories, one comes 
across, as we did yesterday, a handful of long, spind- 
ling, straggling daisies, set in a gorgeous flower-pot, 
tended with care, and looking delicate as things 
tended with care usually are, and one remembers 
the affluent fields of regal gold and white margue- 
rites on the sunny slopes of Green Hill, is one 
struck with the inconsistencies of nature. All the 
luxury of wild lupin, in long spikes of blue and 
yellow, growing through the meadows, will never 
equal in beauty the wild rose hedges, the clover tops 



164 <^N THE WING. 

and daisies, of the fragrant fields that He beside the 
Atlantic. 

The climate of San Francisco is essentially its 
own, however. Ten miles away in any direction, you 
escape the direful, daily winds, the dust and dis- 
comfort. Cross the ferry to Oakland, sail down to 
Saucelito or San Rafael, take the roads leading in any 
direction toward the interior, and you reach shelter 
before you are gone an hour. After ten miles, you 
begin to feel warm; after twenty, you are in summer 
again, especially if there be water near. On the way 
to Sacramento, the river-bed widens into broad, shal- 
low meadows, filled with cattle standing knee-deep in 
the placid waters, and crossed now and then by flights 
of birds, or made picturesque by tall white herons, 
standing immovable amid the sedge, as if just out of a 
Japanese picture. Sacramento itself, lying in the 
midst of these moist green fields, may easily be, as 
we understand it was, unhealthy ; but at the same 
time the abundance of shade and width of the fine, 
regular streets, make it particularly refreshing to 
look at. A pretty fashion is a wide upper balcony 
built out from the second story of houses and stores, 
shading the sidewalk below, and fringed with flowers 
or trailing plants above. It gives a half foreign look 
to a purely American town ; so do the numberless 
pretty small cottages, set in gardens, bright always 
with bewildering flowers, roses eight inches across, 
walls of white honeysuckle and stacks of oleanders. 
I never saw in any other place such a variety of shade 
trees as in this city. Locusts with long, fragrant. 



ON THE WING. 1 65 

drooping blossoms, elms, white oaks, pines, eucalyptus,, 
even fig and orange-trees, were all to be found, over- 
arching the clean plank sidewalks; while in the gar- 
dens, our New England orchard trees, covered with 
bloom and fruit, brought a fragrance of home that made 
them still sweeter. We happened on a poor season to 
test the resources of the country in fruit, however. 
We listen to melting stories of the deliciousness of 
this or that dainty, to moving pictures of baskets full 
of toothsomeness for a quarter, that would cost a poor 
man's fortune at home, and we groan, tortured by 
unavailing longing; for we believe every word we 
hear. Some peculiarity of the climate makes one not 
only ready, but anxious to swallow the biggest state- 
ments. A kind of moral inflation takes possession of 
one. You may not see grapes as big as walnuts, in 
bunches as large as a camel's hump, but you know 
tliey are there, just as surely. Anything, everything 
is possible. Apricots were just beginning to come in, 
but were yet of poor quahty; peaches were small and 
hard ; apples only good for sauce ; strawberri-es, from 
some peculiarity of weather, plentiful but sour, and 
wanting the delicious aroma of our native berry; it 
was too early for figs and pomegranates, and too late 
for oranges, so that only the always wonderful cher- 
ries answered our preconceived ideas of California 
fruit. The vegetables left nothing to be desired. It 
should be the paradise of poor men ; for the climate 
does not require the use of much meat, and every 
form of succulent and delicious vegetable product 
literally overflows tlie markets and produce shops. 



l66 ON THE WING. 

The Grahamites, and other sects that believe the 
eating of flesh harmful, ought to colonize Eldorado. 
They would certainly have every opportunity for prac- 
ticing their pet precepts. 

We found all things except fluids sold by the pound, 
which is a much more rational rule of measurement 
than quarts and pecks. One knows in this way the 
amount one is buying and paying for, whicli one cer- 
tainly does not Ave times out of ten, by our dry meas- 
ure. Who has not at some time or other of her life 
looked in awe and admiration at the amount of spinach 
or the number of large potatoes which go to make up a 
green-grocer's bushel ? By weight, one gets an abso- 
lute quantity, while by measure one purchases different 
degrees of uncertainty, according to the state of the 
market. 

We found, too, an utter ignorance of the small coins 
called cents, two cents, and nickels. A certain large- 
mindedness of the inhabitants gets into the eyes and 
prevents them from seeing anything smaller than a 
"bit" or ten cents. The rest they call "chicken 
feed." The newsboys offer you two papers for a bit, 
so as to overcome the degrading necessity of receiving 
five cents for one ; the boot-black puts on his boss 
shine for a bit, except in some few low-toned quarters 
frequented by impecuniosity ; the entire legion of side- 
walk hucksters and perambulating showmen of striking 
bargains, put their wares upon the basis of a bit, and 
iTiount from that into the golden heights of the eagle. 
I am not sure whether bills are tabooed from some 
idea that tlie national banks are becoming insolvent, 



ON THE WING. 167 

but we never saw a note during our stay in that won- 
derful country. All large change was paid in gold, 
and small in silver, which added weight to our pockets 
if it did nothing else. Perhaps that is why there are 
so many heavy men there. 

On the whole we heartily liked San Francisco in 
spite of its dreadful climate. The generous ampHtude 
of its dimensions, the generous kindness of its people, 
the immense strides it seems capable of making once 
its feet turn in the right direction, its barbaric gor- 
geousness of adornment, its superb contempt for small 
coin of any sort, the fascination of its " dummies " as 
they breathlessly whirl you up the outrageous little 
hills — all these and many other reasons force you to 
love it in spite of discomfort. If we had only come 
upon it in winter, how at once and forever we would 
have been its fascinated slaves like the many thousands 
of bewitched travellers it has won already. But they 
must take more care of their sewerage. There is too 
much typhoid malaria now for solid comfort. And 
after seeing what the lack of rain can do in that won- 
derfully endowed country, can it be possible that any 
of us will ever rail at the blessed summer storms at 
home again ? May my right hand lose its cunning and 
may I be anathema, if spoiled pleasure or crumpled 
finery ever draw one word of lamentation or reproach 
from me, though the rain should flatten out my best 
Sunday hat half a dozen times in the course of this 
present season. For how much worse off we would 
be without it. 

If every person leaving San Francisco for the East 



l68 ON THK WING. 

is obliged to measure off the quantity of red tape we 
saw at the ticket office yesterday, in signing and coun- 
tersigning and witnessing, I wonder tliey do not give 
lip the unequal contest in disgust. The one railroad 
which by right divine governs the Pacific coast seems 
to make the most of its prerogatives ; but it is a ques- 
tion whether throwing so many barriers in the way of 
buying a passage is any material aid to business. 
Perhaps it is on that principle of human nature which 
makes perverse longing dwell most fondly on what is 
hardest to get. We never more fully appreciated the 
value of being excursionists, than when the little red 
book was -handed over, signed, sealed, and delivered 
again, in a twinkling, and we walked off, free as air, 
while the herd of regular passengers stood, ruminant 
and glum, waiting each his slow turn. Fancy an 
Eastern populace waiting in that way for the privilege 
of being allowed to pay a railroad fare ! 



CHAPTER XIV. 

AMONG THE MINES. 

ONE who goes to California and returns without 
having seen anything of its mining interests, 
has lost unknowingly the key which solves 
many of the problems of society there. The romance, 
as well as the reality of the history of the State, is 
bound up in its gold mines. The discoveries which 
in '49 pushed the then almost unknown territory into 
a prominence unique in the annals of civilization, 
have been oroinsf on in greater or less degree ever 
since, so that the California of to-day throughout its 
whole extent is still honeycombed with those deposits 
of golden sand which made it the Pactolus of the 
world. We do not hear any longer of the wild fever 
of excitement which seized men in those earlier days, 
when home, friends, health and even life were thrown 
awav like straws before the fair winds which were 
supposed to lead to fortune ; a certain reticence tliat 
comes with years and experience, and a fixed method 
which takes the place of the old-time haphazard ways, 
have allowed a semi-obscurity to gather over, what is 
still as active an interest there as manufactures are to 
New England, or wheat fields to Nebraska. The wild 
gambling of the stock exchange, with its insincere 



170 ON THE WING. 

manipulation of insecure property, is one thing, while 
the earnest business which returns honest profits on 
lionest investments through the length and breadth of 
the land, is another. What we have been taught to 
look upon as the most chimerical and rabid specula- 
tion into which fortune-seekers can enter, becomes, 
west of the Rocky Mountains, the simple natural 
l)usiness of the land. Around it, in the small mining 
camps, grow up the different industries which make a 
people prosperous and a country powerful. One never 
realizes the power of gold so fully as here, in the land 
which is its, by birthright. Let but the yellow dust 
show itself on hill, or plain, or wild mountain canon, 
in bare desert or fertile valley, and instantly from 
solitude and silence the dead world wakes to excite- 
ment of life. People gather, houses spring up, mills, 
stores, schools, churches rise, as if called by a fairy 
wand, and sun themselves in the light of prosperity. 
By-and-by, when the supply of ore is exhausted, the 
thriving settlement, like a body from which the soul 
has departed, dissolves, and is gone almost as quickly 
as it came, unless, meantime, it has developed other 
resources. The pick and shovel travel away in search 
of other hidden treasure ; only the devastated moun- 
tain-side and deserted "camp" remain to tell that 
man ever dwelt there. 

Nothing in the West is more sadly strange to 
Eastern eyes than one of these ruined settlements. 
It gives one a ghostly, unsettled feeling,' to drive 
through the village street, with its rows of closed 
cottages on either hand, grass growing over the door- 



ON THE WING. 171 

Steps, wild vines hiding the dim windows, and small 
gardens overgrown with the sturdy weeds, which 
fasten like squatters upon the lost heritage of in- 
dustry. Here and there, a single inhabited house 
makes the rest doubly desolate by contrast. An air 
of mystery and desolation, which never belongs even 
to the wildest or most remote regions where nature 
alone holds sway, rests about these silent dwellings. 
Something of j^eace and fitness goes forever from a 
place which man has once used and then discarded, 
and no length of time ever completely brings it back 
again. The most isolated spot on which the eye can 
rest, so long as it is left alone to the sweet influences 
of the natural order, does not impress one with the 
same sense of loneliness which a place once human- 
ized and made conscious of man's presence retains 
forever after. I remember one day, while driving- 
through a certain deserted village, noting one particu- 
lar little cottage, built with more care than its silent 
neighbors, that must some time have been a cozy home 
for some small household. A porch, with a four-paned 
window in each side, and a broad seat below them^ 
jutted out into a little garden, in which two tall clumps 
of calla-lilies and a glowing bush of red geraniums 
held their own yet against nettles and mountain 
sorrell. On the .threshold before the open door, two 
tiny, brown lizards lay basking in the afternoon 
warmth, the gleam in their bright jewel-like eyes alone 
showing that they were alive. A long ray of sunshine 
flickered across the floor and died within the open 
fireplace in the chimney opposite, and the two small- 



172 ON THE WING. 

paned casements were covered with dusty curtains of 
cobwebs. Outside, amid a heap of useless remnants 
of household utensils, a rude wooden baby-carriage, 
broken and weather-stained, made the picture doubly 
pathetic. It seemed as if, indeed, 

" Life and thought had gone away 

Side by side, 

Leaving door and window wide ; 
— Careless tenants they! " 

It was as we rode into the foot-hills beyond the 
valley of the Sacramento, to see a little of the mining 
phase of California life while it was still at its best, 
and to visit one or two prosperous mines, in order that 
we might bring back some definite idea of what makes 
vital interest for so many, that we first saw these sad, 
neglected little camps. For sixty or eighty miles 
after leaving the city, the railroad passes through fields 
of wheat, stretching out of sight and covering the 
land at this season of the year with the lovely pale 
^old of ripened grain. Immense machines for reaping 
and threshing moved at intervals through the billowy, 
yellow expanse, so that one man accomplished the 
work of a dozen. Where steam was required, the 
wheat-straw, after winnowing, was used for fuel ; other- 
wise it was plowed into the earth again to act as a 
fertilizer for the next crop, or used .instead of hay for 
fodder. The fruitful soil gives back two harvests in 
one year, always presuming that water is supplied, for 
dame nature is a thirsty queen even in this lavish 
country. Leaving the line of the railroad, we drove 
for six or eight miles, this being the width of the 



ON THE WING. 1 73 

fertile belt in the valley, through a repetition of these 
harvest scenes, before beginning to ascend the foot- 
hills ; then up a gradual rise tlirough a rolling country 
full of green glades and wooded hillsides, that was 
more beautiful, so far as simple landscape loveliness 
goes, than anything we had yet seen in California. 
There was nothing of the grandeur or vastness which 
made the road into the Yosemite wonderful; but 
such deep dells, and fair, sloping meadows, such 
curving heights and graceful back-ground of rounded 
summits climbing into the clear, pale sky, such a 
wealth of beautiful trees spreading grateful shade 
over the hot road, and stretching in stately groves 
far up to the horizon, we had not met before. We 
made the journey in a private carriage behind a team 
of the small but powerful horses which are so com- 
mon here. I wonder no longer at the old grandees of 
England, who used to make the tour of the European 
continent after this delightful fashion. Next to w^alk- 
ing, it gives the most lingering, loving look at the 
beautiful world through which you pass, and one 
exquisite scene merges into another by gentle gra- 
dations instead of the sudden whirling from post to 
pillar of the railroad car. Given fair weather and a 
l)air of good horses, with a driver who knows what 
he is about, and there is no such absolute luxury as 
this mode of sight-seeing. But it would require a. 
Croesus to be able to afford it, so we must wait for the 
millenium before it comes to pass that we can indulge 
in it. The winding road curved up hill and down 
dale ; waving grain fields faded into the distance 



174 *-*^' -IHE WING. 

behind, and spicy undergrowth of small pines and 
hemlocks crept nearer in the foreground. The brush 
Avas alive with quail, which ran across the road and 
into their haunts by dozens. Jack-rabbits scampered 
from their warrens, or sat with long ears quivering 
almost within reach of the whip-lash, if one could be 
wicked enough to use it. Now and again a small 
flock of the same dirty, draggled sheep we had met 
so often, (how wofull}' unpicturesque sheep are in real 
life) or a smaller flock still of the white, silky, long- 
haired goats, browsed on a pasture near the road, but 
there was no sign of house or human being. Once 
a group of Chinese teamsters, driving half-a-dozen 
market wagons, stopped us to inquire eagerly concern- 
ing a law which had been passed a day or two before, 
restricting the use of water in hydraulic mining. The 
long-contested battle between farmers and miners, 
as to control of water privileges, had just received 
fresh impetus from some judicial decision in favor of 
the former ; and, as all the interests of this portion 
of the country depended upon the mines, there was 
naturally great excitement. '"If the mines aren't 
allowed to run, you '11 all have to skip out, Johnnie, 
my boy," said our friend. " O yes ! But mine gotta 
workee allee samee !*' answered the practical heathen, 
with a shake of the head that set his long pigtail 
dangling like a drunken pendulum. It was no use to 
try to shake liis faith in the future of the countr}-. 

Here, as elsewhere, the Chinese are hewers of wood 
and drawers of water. Whatever is too hard or too 
heavv for white men's bone and muscle, falls to the 



ON THE WING. I 75 

lot of these helots of the west. Their patience, their 
endurance, and their most frugal habits, enable them to 
Hve and thrive where tlie most prudent pale-face would 
starve miserably. They make vegetables grow in the 
midst of barren plains ; they wash riches out of the 
refuse "' tailings " of the gold flumes; they pit their 
stolid capacity for labor against the brains and higher 
intelligence of their employers, and always win their 
point of making money. Every Chinaman who does 
not die, or make so large a fortune that he becomes 
imbued with the Americanism of wanting- to make 
more, returns to his own country, within a few years, 
master of the five hundred dollars, which assures him 
a competence for life. We met them in forty different 
situations. — always busy, always smiling, and always 
apparently content. It made us almost desire that we 
might be allowed to tackle this extremely Eastern 
question at home, to see the deftness, the swiftness, 
and the astonishing capacity those engaged in house- 
work showed. A little such healthy competition might 
stimulate the jaded energies of our present household 
brigade to real earnestness in fulfilling their duties. 
At present, I believe no place in the world claiming 
a hisfh degree of civilization suffers more from the 
tyranny or stupidity of untrained service, than the New 
England states. To do the minimum of labor at the 
maximum of price, seems to be of late years the 
watchword of the order; and an honest pride in fur- 
thering the best interests of the employer is one of the 
lost arts in their kingdom. There are jewels among 
them, to be sure, but jewels never come in mass ; and 



176 ON THE WING. 

the ordinary house servant, one of the rank and file, 
in an ordinary family, is apt to cause nearly as much 
expenditure of moral force as she saves in physical 
exertion. The Chinamen have not been educated ta 
this point yet. The instinct of centuries of submission 
makes them willing to work, so long as any work re- 
mains to be performed. Some peculiar race develop- 
ment renders them exact to minuteness in reproducing 
what has been shown or explained ; and great personal 
neatness, which is one of the last things with which 
they are popularly credited, make them very valuable 
parts of domestic machinery, so far as material well- 
being is concerned. The moral aspect of the question 
I do not enter upon at all ; it would need closer study 
and longer acquaintance to dare offer an opinion on 
that point. 

But to return to the road through the foot-hills. 
The little mountain streams we passed were thick and 
muddy. Here and there a level place was covered with 
a smooth, shining deposit of yellowish clay. These 
were the "slickens " which farmers declare are ruining 
their prospects by destroying the fertilizing power of 
the water. The pure streams, after being brought in 
ditches and subjected to the uses of the miners, come 
down to them so impregnated with fine sand and 
debris, that they are useless for irrigation. It is to 
reach some fair settlement of this vexed question as to 
who owns the water that this lonsr litiiration has gone 
on from year to year, and seems to-day as far from 
final adjustment as ever. The only decision must 
be in some form of compromise. Either side has 



ON THE WING. 



177 



rights that can never be entirely set aside. Meantime 
each party goes its own way, irrespective of judge 
and jury. 

The little mining camp we entered just at sunset, 
in the green hollow of the hills, with its one strag- 
ghng street galloping down one steep side, and all 
the public-spirited buildings of the place hemming it 
closely in, was one of the prettiest villages we ever 
looked at. Even the rival grocery stores, each with 
its partisan groups of lounging miners enjoying their 
evening smoke, wore a look of interest to us. The 
roof of each broad piazza extended nearly across the 
road, and made unique porte-cocheres for the service 
of man and beast. The two little churches faced 
each other across the dusty street; the two hotels 
glared into each other's windows ; the most home-like 
small cottages we had seen out of New England nestled 
in their bright gardens, half hidden behind vines of 
gigantic roses, or climbing honeysuckle, and screened 
by clumps of red and white oleanders as large as small 
trees. In one place the stream through the great ditch 
which furnished water-power for the mines, was carried 
under the road with a deep sound like a cataract; 
otherwise al: was still. It was as different from the 
harsh ideai our fancies had made of the baseness and 
blankness of a mining camp as can well be imagined, 
and we found the inner life of the houses as pleasant 
as their outer seeming. There were whorls of Japan- 
ese fans on the walls, and fluttering muslin curtains 
on the windows ; there were pictures and easy-chairs 
and rugs; there were recent books and the Eastern 
12 



178 ON THE WING. 

magazines, so that, except for the big summer kitchen, 
with its folding walls, which could make it at will either 
an open shed or a cozy room, there was nothing to re- 
mind one of the great continent between us and home. 

The next few days among the mines were real ex- 
periences. One of the celebrated blue gravel banks, 
two hundred feet high, was being washed to powder by 
a gigantic stream of water directed at will against its 
surface by a pipe with nozzles ten inches in diameter, 
through which the stream tore with such fury and 
force that everything crumbled before it. Masses 
weighing tons were crumbled into atoms in this way, 
and swept down the long flumes and sluices, dropping, 
meantime, their precious burden of yellow dust to 
amalgamate with the quicksilver spread below. The 
water which did al] this was brought in a continuous 
ditch, thirty-seven miles long, from its source in the 
lofty mountains of the upper country, sometimes 
bridged across ravines, sometimes tunnelled through 
hillsides, and watched along its entire length by a 
gang of overseers who patrolled its banks so many 
times every twenty-four hours. 

At stated times the stream is turned off, the wooden 
flumes cleaned of their contents, the quicksilver 
evaporated in immense ovens and condensed again in 
retorts for future use, while the precious, sordid, 
blessed, wicked metal, the 

" Gold, gold, gold, gold ! 
Bright and heavy, hard and cold," 

is run off into molds and sent off to be coined into 
that power which is able to do so much good — and so 



ON THK WING. 1 79 

little. At first our unused eyes found gold in every- 
thing that glittered; but we learned soon that the 
real article had much less shimmer and shine about it. 
It was not the first time, nor unfortunately tlie last, 
that base metals have put on the false semblance of 
preciousness and deceived ignorance, while real worth 
remained undiscovered near by. But we soon trained 
our perceptions and now, if you want judges of the 
richness oi blue gravel peppered all over with fine, 
dull spots, which hold within them such a heritage of 
power for good or evil, we are ready to be called 
in as experts. 

In this hydraulic mining, tlie men employed have 
many advantages. They are in the free air and sun- 
shine: the work is all above ground, where the fair 
face of the world still smiles upon them. There is 
something inspiring in this search after the treasure 
whicli nature had hidden away so carefully in her 
river-beds, washed down from the eternal mountains 
thousands and thousands of years ago. One would 
like to go at it one's self, and wrest from the bald, 
towering cliff' above, the secret hoard which makes 
every foot of it precious. One would like to change 
places for awhile with any of those great long-booted, 
red-shirted fellows, hairy and brawny, who stand so 
superbly in the midst of the roaring, rushing stream, 
guiding its course and helping its work. It looks like 
pleasant and healthful, if hard, labor, with nothing- 
dark or ugly about it, except the ''slickens" which go 
sweeping down to flood the bright meadows beyond. 
We would like to have seen one of the blasts that 



l8o ON THE WING 

from time to time tear the perpendicular walls of the 
old river-bed asunder with a charge of thirty or fifty- 
thousand pounds of gunpowder, so that the whole 
visible hillside quivers, as if in the throes of an earth- 
quake, and breaks in an avalanche of dust and broken 
fragments on the plain below. Eye-witnesses of some 
such former events gave us graphic descriptions in 
the patois of the country of the fury and force, " the 
all-fired cussedness of the way the thing lit out." 
Losing such opportunities for sight-seeing is one of 
the unhallowed consequences of living, as we do, too 
close to sunrise. 

But the quartz mining which we saw a day or two 
after, with its thunder of infernal machinery stamping 
and crushing the rock fed to it, with its fourteen 
hundred foot shaft leading men down to the bowels 
of the earth, to work, cramped for room, panting for 
air, one small candle only making a spot of light in 
the dreadful darkness, how different the toil for gold 
looked in this ! Even in the beginning, before it is yet 
refined or purified, before it has become the medium 
for buying, and selling, and bartering, and bargaining, 
how much hardship and suffering it causes already ! 
No wonder the Spartans made their criminals wear 
gems and gold, in order to dissuade honest people 
from love of the base, bright baubles. Standing 
at the entrance to the dark chasm below, while the 
president explained how many millions in how many 
years had been paid out to complacent stockholders, 
one could only think of the inscription which Dante 
placed over the entrance to his Inferno. No doubt if 



ON THE WING. l8l 

the superintendent and his regiment of subalterns 
could have read my musings, they would have lauglied 
with scorn at the bare idea of any one being de- 
pressed, in the shaft-house of a flourishing gold mine, 
with plenty of ore in sight. But I w^ould almost rather 
never know where the treasure came from; there's 
too much "bubble, bubble, toil and troul^le,"' from the 
very commencement. It was a relief to liear that 
accidents are extremely rare, and that the men are 
perfectly satisfied with their work. They are well 
paid, able to live comfortably, and the life acquires in 
time a great fascination for them. 

The amount of dividends paid in a quiet way by 
such mines as this, unknown to fame and the stock- 
board, owned by a few prosperous individuals, and 
only familiar to the region in which they are placed, is 
simply astonishing. This quartz mine, of which we 
have spoken last, is an example. Bought for a trifle 
in 1865 by eight or ten men, and worked ever since, it 
has missed but five times in paying a large monthly 
dividend on the original shares, while putting up at 
the same time stam]>mills, refining and leaching works, 
and giving employment directly to several hundred 
men. One can scarcely estimate the number they 
employ indirectly. A business that buys eighty thou- 
sand cords of wood yearly for private use, reaches out 
so far that it is hard to gather it all together. 

On the way between these two successful mines, 
we passed many others, some moderately prosperous, 
some just "striking it;" others, alas ! like the Luck* 
of Roaring Camp, after the luck had left it, stranded 



1 82 ON THE WING. 

and forsaken. But the pretty valley towns, full of 
bright, comfortable homes, with the general air of 
cheeriness which comes with prosperity, were suf- 
ficient guarantee that all the golden days were not yet 
over in California. Many of them, like that of Grass 
Valley, w^ere particularly delightful spots for tired eyes 
to rest on. Nestled in the bosom of the ever-beautiful 
hills, the pointed roofs of its pretty cottages, only 
seen here and there, amid the wealth of embowering 
greenery, lavish in flowers and fragrance, with a sturdy 
backbone of thriving business streets, a whole staff of 
churches, a regiment of bright homes, and — thank 
heaven ! — only a corporal's guard of liquor shops, it 
was charming enough to make one desire to stay in it. 
As a rule, in the west, the saloons outnumber all the 
other business places put together. We lunched at 
an unpretending hotel on the main street, which, for 
coolness, cleanliness and comfort, with its pretty inner 
court full of roses and climbing vines, made a most 
refreshing contrast to many more showy houses. It 
was kept by a Boston man, who had married a tidy 
Eastern woman ; indeed, we begin to doubt whether 
there are any real westerners at all in this cosmo- 
politan country. Such towns . as this are doubly 
welcome, after the sad, bare settlements of the South- 
western States, which made life look too hard to be 
borne by the average man or woman. The people, 
like all we have met in California, were exceedingly 
"warm-heated, eager to offer any little kindness, even 
*when we stopped only to ask a question. The dialect 
was peculiar, a little of Bret Plarte, but not very much 



ON THE \VIN(;. 183 

of him. mildly suggesting itself everywhere. They 
** allowed " that a certain man " lit out " from a certain 
place, and another "fit" a fire in the woods all night; 
and their slang was exceedingly piquant. But we did 
not come upon any chivalresque gambler, ready to kill 
a man and take off his hat to a woman at the same 
time, so that, on the whole, mining must have degen- 
erated since Harte's time. 



CHAPTER XV. 



IN THE CITY OF ZION. 



WE were most agreeably disappointed in the 
Nevada desert and alkali plains. After 
. the unearthly desolation of the south, they 
wore a look more subdued than oppressive. At this 
time of the year, the delicate green of sage-brush, 
with the pale gray of the white sage, which covers so 
much of the territory, made a soft mass of neutral 
tint set in high relief by the dusky, far-away moun- 
tains, stretching on both sides across the entire 
country. The dazzling white of alkali fields showed 
itself here and there like hoar frost. Something of 
the delicious breadth and freedom which is found by 
the sea, moves one here also in the immense ou'Jook 
which stretches away to the horizon. Tlie Iluml^oldt 
River played hide-and-seek through the valley along 
almost its entire length; now and agaiii streaks or 
rifts of snow on some soaring summit gave picturesque 
effect to the entire range in siglit, or frowning pali- 
sades straightly set in narrow gorges shut out for a 
little wliile tlie rest of the world. Little whirlwinds of 
fine dust were constantly rising, like inverted cones, 
and after keeping up a few moments of incessant 
whirling, blowing themselves into thin mist in the 
bright air. There was great grandeur in the vastness 



1 86 ON THE WING. 

and monotony of the scene, but nothing haunting or 
depressing, as in the ghostly outlook of the southern 
country ; so that the day spent in crossing the desert, 
to which we looked forward with such dread, was 
really anything but tiresome ; and the night before 
reaching Utah, whether from some unexplained excel- 
lence of the sleeping-berths, or some unknown influence 
of the beautiful brilliant atmosphere, which reminded 
us so much of Colorado, was the very best and most 
refreshing we had passed since leaving home. The 
air, like that of Manitou, seems absolutely to scintil- 
late with light and purity. One draws long breaths, 
and inspires exhilaration. The stories of returning 
miners, which have heretofore been regarded as absurd 
western exaggerations, of refuse meat and offal drying 
up, instead of putrifying or tainting, become easy 
of belief. In spite of its barrenness, its lack of trees 
and verdure, its surface of sand and rock, its dread- 
fully severe winters and uncomfortable summers, the 
radiant atmosphere and glowing sky go far to com- 
pensate for all shortcomings. When we woke, next 
day, at early morning, and saw in the light of the 
dawning Sabbath the deep-blue of the great Salt Lake 
sweeping toward the snowy Wahsatch mountains, 
while the great, gray plain lay asleep in the shadow, 
and the mountain tips were rosy with the flush of 
coming dawn, it seemed for the moment like the 
embodiment of rest and peace ; yet, travellers who 
have frequently crossed this waste, declare that at 
other seasons the dreariness and dust of this part 
of the route are intolerable. Our exceptional good 



ON THE WING. 1 87 

fortune brought us through without even a touch 
of ennui. 

Perhaps because this unlooked-for pleasure in find- 
ing the desert attractive had made us expect too much, 
perhaps because unconsciously the blight in its moral 
atmosphere had chilled our physical perception, \xc 
did not find Salt Lake City as interesting as we an- 
ticipated. This was the more strange because the 
valley in which it lies is so exceedingly beautiful, 
enclosed within a framework of exquisitely outlined 
hills, with the deep, shining waters of the great lake 
on one side, and the green, smiling fields and waving 
trees of a fruitful country on the other side. It is 
like a lovely vision, a pastoral idyl, after the severe 
prose of the plains, which stretch beyond its moun- 
tain walls. Full of vivid color, rich in the promise of 
spring-time, eloquent of that peace and content which 
a beautiful landscape always breathes, it was a gracious 
sight, and unconsciously prepared one to be pleased 
with what came after. The small houses and farms 
had an air of great thrift and neatness, the herds and 
stock grazing here and there were unusually sleek and 
comfortable. In the city, the great width of streets, 
and their long lines of locust and poplar-trees, gave a 
certain stateliness to even the humblest locality, and 
the people as well as the children looked so com- 
fortably cared-for that there was nothing to find fault 
with ; but there was, even about their best institutions, 
as well as in the deportment of its population, such a 
glaring contempt for the beauties and amenities of 
life, that it grated on one after the first glance ; the 



l88 ON THE WING. 

well-being seemed so entirely temporal, and so far 
apart from any corresponding spiritual perception. 

The disdain in which they appear to hold preten- 
tious dwellings and polite manners, was not the fine 
feelinii" of those who know the greater value of hiirher 
things, but the grosser instincts of carelessness in 
those who have never yet reached even the best ap- 
preciation of lower ones. There is no truth in a 
religion which tramples the purest and noblest instincts 
of womanhood under foot ; there can be no stability 
in it. It is too dreadful a state of things for hope to 
live through, or wa"etchedness to endure; and in spite 
of my best desire to see the contrary, the faces of the 
men and women about showed but differing repetitions 
of the same unwholesome story. The few sensitive 
ones looked unhappy; the many coarser, indifferent. 
In all the sea of faces at service in the immense 
tabernacle, these w^ere the two prevailing types ; only 
a few were free from it, and these were either mothers 
holding little babies, and happy in the care, or youths 
of either sex too young to understand their abnormal 
position. Even among the presiding elders there was 
no subtle magnetism of devotion or refinement. The 
poorest meeting-house of a New England village 
would show among its deacons better heads and more 
spiritual countenances than this stronghold of Mor- 
monism could summon from the whole range of its 
best class, to represent the hierarchy of its church. 
The Latter-Day Saints, which is the title they claim 
ofiicially, show neither in face nor bearing the qualities 
which we usually consider as belongings of those who 



ON THE WliNG. 1 89 

live in the odor of sanctity. There is neither cahn 
patience, sweet benignity, deep thought, soaring aspira- 
tion, nor loving kindness, to be found in the looks 
of these typical men. In their place, shrewdness, 
obstinacy, and a complacent arrogance, strike the be- 
holder with any but spiritual reflections — qualities 
much more likely to be canonized by the Mammon of 
Unrighteousness than the God cf humility and peace. 

The thought cf the social ulcer which preys upon 
society, embittered every practical aspect of this 
country to us. It, and it alone, made the clear air 
dim, the bright water running in the roadside ditches 
muddy, the pleasant shadow cf waving trees dark and 
intclcrable. The condition of things which allows it 
to be possible in a presumably Christian country, to 
point out the Amelia Palace as the residence of its 
ruler's "favorite v/ife," explains its own weakness and 
wickedness. The divine mandate which raises woman 
to the sublime dignity of wife and mother has nothing 
in common wath such degrading comparisons. 

Many of the clean, neat little houses (fcr the large, 
Gentile fashion cf taking up much ground for dwelling- 
places .seemed to have stopped outside the valley, and 
the homes were all small and tidy), had the piazza 
divided by a centre railing; and one wife and her 
children sat on one side, while the other little group 
occupied the other. Even where this outward sign of 
division was omitted, we learned that some distinction 
cf i:lace was made between the different members of 
one family within the dwellings. It was customary, 
or not unusual, to have one mistress and her depend- 



190 ON THE WING. 

€nts in the city house, and another at the country 
ranche, so that the master would meet some part of 
his multiphed wife wherever he turned. The one- 
armed driver who took us through the town had two 
wives and eighteen children. One would think he 
would need both arms for such a regiment ; but he 
seemed cjuite equal to the situation, and said with a 
leer, which in Christian countries would not be con- 
sidered consistent with matrimony, that he was "about 
ready for number three now." It was the ugliest 
commentary we heard on "the institution,"' and by 
a Mormon. 

It looked peaceful and proper enough ; but our un- 
ruly imaginations put riot, and bitterness, and dreadful 
thoughts enough in the souls behind those stolid, 
heavy faces to make a moral tornado. We tortured 
ourseh^es more during those two or three days in this 
stronghold of the Saints, as they call tliemselves, with 
a defiant pride which looks gigantic by the side of 
their assumed humilitv, than in all the hairbreadth 
'scapes and positive dangers of the trip put together. 
It was 'so impossible to connect those common- 
place looking people and their commonplace ambitions 
and works, with the hell-upon-earth whicli the reigning 
condition of things would create in our own bosoms, 
that it made us feel as if we were trying to reap the 
whirlwind. No doubt we did grevious injustice to 
many a peaceful Gentile, by imagining him one of the 
polygamous band, and hating him accordingly, while 
we wasted yearning sympathy over this or that good, 
honest woman, the one wife of her one husband, — for 



ON THE WING. I9I 

Salt Lake City is no longer peopled by Mormons alone. 
A large and thriving portion of tlie population live 
their own lives and follow their own religion, with- 
out fear of avenging angel or thug-like Danite. Many 
of the prettiest houses in the best situations be- 
long now to this colony, and the number increases 
day by day. So long, however, as the church co- 
operative system continues to exist, 1 cannot see that 
it leaves great scope for large business transactions 
outside. 

As far as material prosperity goes, it requires very 
little time to become convinced that the political 
economy of the Saints is a success. Under the cloak 
of religion, the church follows its believers to the 
home, to the store, to the office, and retains a helping, 
as well as a grasping hand, in every affair of life. As 
a consequence, there is none of the squalor, none of 
the uncared-for distress, which is so harrowing in 
other cities. Every one looks well fed ; every one is 
decently clothed ; there is even a feeling of relief in 
escaping suddenly and completely from the velvet and 
diamond fever which seems to have prostrated every 
other womankind of the Western country. There is 
an honest simplicity which allows people to live in 
accordance with primitive rulings ; they are not brought 
up against some rock of etiquette or conventionality 
at every turn of the rudder. There is a wholesome 
disregard of gloves and fashions ; the cotton and 
woolen overskirts of six years ago, and even further 
back, sit cheek-by-jowl wath the cotton and wool over- 
skirts of the latest Harper's Bazar. Most of the 



192 



ON THE WING. 



finery worn in the Tabernacle was as evidently of 
home production as the Tabernacle itself, and no man 
or woman seemed to feel the reproach or incongruity 
of companionship with finer feathers. I say seemed; 
for, in spite of the startlingly self-complacent and bril- 
liantly ungrammatical report of a missionary brother 
just returned from preaching the " new gospel of 
faith " to the heathens of West Tennessee, we caught 
many a furtive glance at the exceedingly modest 
toggery of our own party, trying to detect whether 
kilt-pleatings or box-plaits were most in favor with the 
wicked world's people, or if we tied our pullbacks 
quite as tightly as in eighteen hundred and eighty-one. 
The mothers, sitting here and there through the con- 
gregation, bared their breasts and nursed their infants 
with most absolute unconcern of neighborhood ; the 
children, scattered broadcast through the immense 
edifice, clattered through the aisles as if they were 
sidewalks, dipped tin cups of water from the open 
barrels just inside the Temple doors, laughed a little 
and cried a good deal, after the manner of children 
cooped up in a place of worship all the world over. 
When communion time came, there was little to 
remind one of the sanctity of a religious ceremony in 
the hastily broken bits of bread passed around in 
plated baskets, and eaten with as much unconcern as 
a peanut by every man, woman and child in the entire 
edifice. I remember being very much impressed once 
by a general love-feast of this kind in the Cathedral of 
Notre Dame at Montreal ; but there was not an atom 
of reverence or devotion about the rite as adminis- 



ON THE WING. 



93 



tereil in the Mormon Church. The people, taken as 
a whole, were the poorest representative body 1 ever 
saw gathered; a heavy air of vulgar satisfaction in the 
men and a weary unconcern, in spite of the simple life 
and delightful atmosphere, in the w'omen. In the 
Temple, as in the street, one of the usual facts in 
polygamy was further verified. The man of the h(;use 
sat or walked with the youngest wife, while the others 
took post-graduate places. I remember one evening 
walking a long distance behind a surly man, who was 
beaming, as much as he could beam, on a rather 
homely-dressed woman, while he threw back an occa- 
sional command to "get along," or "hurry up,'* to 
an older person struggling with a cross three-year-old 
boy, who walked submissively behind. They listened 
in the church to the religious exercise with decorum, 
but without the slightest particle of interest or evi- 
dence of interior spirit. It looked as if any one of 
them might say, wath Tennyson's North Country 
Farmer listening to his preacher: — 

"An I niver knawed whot a mean'd, but I thowt a ad sunimut to saav. 
An I thowt a said whot a owt to 'a said an I corned awaay." 

The classes from w'hich, in the main, iMormonism 
receives its recruits, would partly explain this lack of 
animation or interest. Probably, no set of people in 
the world are more material, or on a lower mental 
plane, than the operatives of large English manufac- 
turing towns, the miners of Wales, and the laborers 
in small German farming villages. It is largely to 
these overburdened lives, in which existence resolves 
13 



194 « ON THE WING. 

itself into a constant struggle to snatch food from the 
jaws of want, that the preachers of this new religion 
come with a gospel more of the body than the spirit; 
with promise of lighter toil, better wages and in- 
creased comfort ; with the vexed question of jDolygamy 
left adroitly in the background for future discussion, 
and only the broad, easy tenets of doctrine offered for 
dull brains to ponder over. Unless report is more 
than ever a liar, a majority of the "converts" to this 
creed become aware of its most remarkable dogma, 
after they are within the limits of Utah. Once there, 
the wise laws regarding labor and expense, the system 
of tithes, the patriarchal government, the amplitude of 
ease which comes to almost every individual, half 
hampers them by imjDlied obligations, half blinds their 
naturally obtuse religious sense, and makes them 
ready to adopt any code which is laid down for their 
observance. But it is no use to tell any woman, that 
custom or prejudice, or even the uplifting of martyr- 
dom, can make the sharing of her home rights and 
her heart's longings, peaceful, or happy, or healthful, 
for any other woman under the sun. 

In spite of the pamphlets for sale in the lobby of 
the hotel, which gave letter after letter from leading 
wives and mothers of the kingdom, proclaiming their 
entire satisfaction with, and approbation of, the pecu- 
liar tenets of their chosen religion, and the peace and 
harmony in which they live with the three, five, or 
seven other consorts of their beloved husbands, there 
is a strong and invincible conviction that they are 
speaking for a purpose. Their faces tell a truer story. 



ON THE WING. 1 95 

The well-to-do aspect of the city is enhanced by its 
beautiful situation. Every house, without exception, 
has its bit of ground laid out according to the owner's 
taste, so that instead of the inevitable tenement blocks 
in other cities, one walks here through streets lined 
with gardens and grateful with shade. The new 
buildings going up for religious purposes within the 
enclosure of the present Tabernacle, promise to be 
more imposing in style and finish than anything yet 
attempted in the city. Some few residences of the 
wealthier Gentile merchants, or the more prominent 
religious officials, are sufficiently elegant to be notice- 
able here, but hardly to make a show in other cities of 
the same proportions. The private houses belonging 
of old to Brigham Young, were remarkable for nothing 
but a certain aggressiveness of size, and had more the 
aspect of buildings connected with a community than 
with family life. We were a little amused on entering 
one of the recitation-rooms of the catechism-classes, 
to hear a body of small people repeating answers and 
texts in concert with more respect for the sound than 
the sense of their lessons. They were reciting the 
Sermon on the Mount, as we came in, going over and 
over again in unison each section, until it was learned 
by rote. That it was by rote, a lusty youngster just 
in front proved to his own satisfaction and ours by 
shouting out,- each time, " Blessed are they that 
mourn, for they shall be comfortable ; " while the 
teacher, unheeding, allowed him to shout away. It 
was the old contest between the letter and the spirit. 

I wonder very much, that, with the clear streams 



196 ON THK WING, 

of water running at either side of their streets, the 
people do not utihze part of it to moisten the intoler- 
able dust, which is overpowering at certain seasons. 
It shows a want of foresight not in keeping with such 
l^ractical tendencies. Every evening in summer a 
train runs up the narrow-gauge road to several 
watering-places on the road, and both Mormon and 
Gentile avail themselves of the privilege of bathing 
and seeing sunset on the lake. The evening we were 
there was memorable for a glory of color that made 
all previous memories of sunsets dim. Low on the 
horizon, between a sapphire sea and sapphire sky, a 
mass of gray clouds changed in a few instants to 
flaming islands burning on an amber ocean; the ter- 
raced hills on the right changed their dull, sage-green 
to a pale, luminous emerald; one solitary peak just 
under the deeply-glowing sky wrapped itself from l)ase 
to summit, in a royal robe of purple; while across 
the water, toward the east, the snowy points of the 
Wahsatch Range caught a rosy flush from the re- 
flected light behind them, as if the spirit of morning, 
instead of evening, was spreading radiant pinions over 
the world. There was the utmost incongruity between 
this superb, yet harmonious, scene, and the crowd of 
noisy bathers, full of rough fun, who bobbed, and 
squirmed, and floated like corks on the densely salt 
water. It was impossible to sink ; one could sit as in 
an arm-chair on the calm sea ; there was no danger of 
being drowned, but a fair certainty of being pickled, 
so we wisely refrained from buying experience at such 
a price. 



ON THE WING. I97 

The hotels of the city, though fairly comfortable, 
do not show the same care for the accommodation of 
guests as those to Avhich we had been accustomed. 
One who was not there at tlie exact supper hour, had 
to wait the convenience of cook and w-aiter for even a 
cup of tea and a boiled egg. Any of the little luxuries 
of the bill of fare were utterh' out of the question 
for late comers. We left in the early morning, so 
early that we had slops for tea, cold potatoes, cold 
esfSfs, and cold victuals g-enerallv. It was the worst 
meal we had on the trip, and tlie poorest service. 
Nothing was hot but our tempers : they were boiling. 
If their object w^as " to speed the parting guest," they 
succeeded admirably; we would not have waited longer 
for a kingdom. Besides, our faces were fairly turned 
eastw^ard ; and once one gets on the home-stretch, 
after a long and changeful journey of this kind, all the 
blandishments of the stranger could not compensate 
for any added delay that would keep us from the dear 
hands already stretched in w^elcome. We were made 
glad, too, by a rain, a rca/, fine, down-pouring rain, 
acknowledged by the world, and welcomed as a blessed 
thing. For so long we had had no rain at all, or else 
had been obliged to smuggle it in under so manv 
disguises, such as mist or fog, or some undefined 
quantity, as if it were a thing to be ashamed of, 
that we took genuine pride in the dripping, warm, 
delicious moisture : it was like the first breath of home. 
The beautiful valley, as we passed through it again on 
our way to Ogden, was lovelier than ever. It seemed 
as if, leaving the city, we left an incubus behind which 



198 ON THE WING. 

had unconsciously been weighing upon us. Between 
the mountains on one hand, and the lake on the other, 
each instant brought a new point of loveliness to view; 
and one realized that here, as in the old hymn of our 
childhood, 

" Every prospect pleases, 
And only man is vile." 



CHAPTER XVI. 

HOMEWARD-HOUND ACROSS THE COXTIXEXT. 

THE fine scenery through Weber and Echo 
canons lost something of its effect on us from 
the anti-cHmax of seeing it, after the more 
magnificent wildness of the Colorado gorges, just as 
the Nevada desert seemed tame after the fierce deso- 
lation of the Southern saharas. If considerations of 
climate and weather made it possible — as unfortu- 
nately they do not — to reverse the order of travel, and 
coming first, as is usual, across the northern route, to 
finish sight-seeing with the Denver and Rio Grande 
Railway, the natural progression of wonders would be 
better retained. A succession of the most admirable 
points of view are crowded on this small line, which, 
in connection with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa 
Fe, crosses and recrosses with a network of tracks 
the whole Southwestern country. It was a little odd 
to find ourselves in the native haunts of this latter 
road, which liad been familiar to most of us before as 
the irrepressible acrobat of the stock-board, with a 
mania for bounding and tumbling, and find that it had a 
local habitation as well as a name. May its dividends 
never be less, for the sake of the sincere pleasure it 
gave us ! 

There is no portion of Western travel, however. 



2 00 ON THK WING. 

which does not possess its own special charm to one 
who knows how to look for it. We had heard the 
great plains of Wyoming spoken of as decidedly un- 
interesting, but we found them quite the reverse. 
There is great impressiveness about these immense 
level reaches, covered wnth roving flocks and herds, 
narrowed here and there by lowering buttes of bright, 
red rock, or high-piled basaltic columns, but, for the 
most part, vast, silent, and solitary. Through all 
these uninhabited plains, both north and south, full of 
the strange majesty of desolation, the harmonies of 
David's symphonic poem, " The Desert," which the 
Boylston Clul) liad given just before we left home, 
rang in my ears like a solemn invocation. The per- 
sistence of the low C, which underlies the entire first 
movement, and gives such solemnity to the composi- 
tion, seemed particularly appropriate to express the 
magnitufle and isolation of these stupendous mono- 
tones. We rode in front of the engine thirty or forty 
miles one day. through the brilliant atmosphere, which, 
probably, belongs to every region of plateaux elevated 
so high above sea level, until the swiftness of motion 
and heavenly air produced an exhilaration never to be 
forgotten. Life may hold more inspiring moments, but 
we are content for the present to rest here; although a 
jjrecarious seat on a cow-catcher seems to have as 
little moral connection with inspiration as it would 
be possible to bring about. But mind does not any 
longer depend on matter. It was only in old days that 
the muse required to pose on a pedestal ; now she sits 
in any easy-chair and uses a ty])e-writer. 



ON THE WING. 201 

We were surprised at the invariably good meals 
which followed us through this route at such distances 
from any depot of supplies ; and wherever, at any of 
the small stations along the line, an attempt had been 
made at irrigation, either by ditches bringing streams 
from the far-away mountains, or l^y means of wells, 
the lavish abundance of vegetation in flowers, trees 
and produce made the world beautiful for a little 
space, showing that both soil and climate were there, 
if only patience and prudence, like the rod of Moses, 
tapped and bade the living waters leap forth. 

Fine specimens of quartz crystals, petrified wood 
and moss agates, were for sale at the wayside inns. 
At Green River, along with these, were a few wild 
animals, caged and lonesome, showing their dislike of 
being mewed up in their rough dens, just as well as if 
they were part of Barnum's menagerie. It looked 
doubly unkind to see them captive in the very heart of 
this primitive nature, which was mother and nurse 
of all wild things. If it is a measure of safety to 
capture coyote and grizzly, well and good ; but kill 
them kindly at once, and never let them beat their 
lives out in dull, brutish rage against the bars. It 
was at this same station that a very good specimen of 
Western humor, coarse but trenchant, was handed 
about in the shape of a set of rules and regulations 
belonging to the two-story wooden hotel at which we 
took supper. Quotations from it had been posted 
here and there in the offices of public-houses, even in 
the Valley ; but this was the first time the entire 
document was forced on our attention. The office- 



202 ON THE WING. 

clerk is described in the bill as one who "has been 
carefully selected to please everybody; can play draw- 
poker, match worsted at the village store, shake for 
drinks at any hour of the day or night, play billiards, 
waltz, dance the German, make a fourth at euchre, 
flirt with any young lady and not mind being cut dead 
" when pa comes down," put forty people in the best 
room of the house when the hotel is full, attend to the 
enunciator, and answer questions in Greek, Choctaw, 
Irish, or any other polite language at the same mo- 
ment, without turning a hair." The evident enjoyment 
with which this combination of Mercury and Gany- 
mede distributed his caustic parody among our people 
gave us a feeling that the sarcasm was meant to be 
personal. Can it be possible that there are ever 
persons from the East who make ridiculous demands 
of Western innkeepers } I really wonder ! 

The forty or fifty miles of snow-sheds through which 
the railroad passes during the first part of the home- 
ward journey, are another novelty. Such constant, 
unpremeditated pkmges into obscurit)', without rhyme 
or reason to give warning of their approach, would 
addle the brain of most people, but we are all so clear- 
headed ! Trains of emigrant wagons pass many times 
a day, each with its troop of led horses, its populous 
colony of little children, and escort of sunburned, 
bearded men, looking with patient eyes to the still 
farther west toward which they journey. I did not 
realize before that so many settlers move themselves 
and their belongings in this way, at this late date. It 
looked pleasant and comfortable enough in the clear. 



ON THE WING. 203 

bright weather; but how the women and children 
must suffer in the wild storms which sometimes devas- 
tate this region ! Flocks of antelopes were almost 
constantly in sight, bounding over the plains, not so 
graceful or pretty a creature as the tall, antlered deer 
we passed in going and coming from the Yo Semite^ 
but still pleasant objects to look at. 

It was somewhere here, on the way to Cheyenne, 
that we took on board an Indian scout, one of those 
who guided the government forces at the time of the 
Meeker excitement. We braved the lurid atmosphere 
of the smoking-car for a couple of hours one evening, 
in order to listen to the viva voce stories of this un- 
tutored hero. I am bound to confess that the real 
Indian scout is a very poor grub, when compared with 
the fine butterfly who takes his name sometimes in city 
shows. Your natural article is a plain, inoffensive- 
looking man enough, exhaling a strong flavor of to- 
bacco, reticent of speech, a little awkward of manner, 
and dressed in the ready-made, ill-fitting suit of the 
poor man in all chmates. There is very little fire in 
his eyes or voice ; his hair is short, his beard un- 
shaven, his gestures awkward, as if he needed the 
excitement of activity to make him self-forgetful. He 
gives you his plain, horrible facts in the simplest 
language, which is still more graphic than the stage 
eloquence of his rival ; he does not call the Indians 
names ; he hates them too much to waste words on 
them ; he acknowledges they have been ill-treated, but 
agrees with every other Westerner that "they got to 
be stamped out." He is as unassuming and neutral- 



204 ON THE WING. 

tinted as any day-laborer, with not even a stray gleam 
of the eye to tell you that over and over again he has 
looked into the face of almost certain death, and never 
left the shadow blanch his own. We were disap- 
pointed at first, as any women of taste w^ould be, 
remembering the splendid chevelure and flowing mous- 
tache of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, the defiant 
swagger of the fine animals, their broad-sashed w^aists 
and fringed leggings, their wide Gainsboro' sombreros 
and brilliancy of blanket and daring. The memory of 
those stately heroes, riding arms akimbo, and eyes in 
a fine frenzy rolling, up and down the city streets, at 
tlie liead of their war-painted braves, was still fresh in 
our mind, and put the modest nearer view out of 
focus. To see one such creature as that was balm 
to the spirit; you felt that " One blast upon his bugle- 
horn was worth ten thousand men," and that, somehow 
or other, the small, quiet, modest fellow before you 
had cheated you of something; but, like a woman of 
taste, also, you changed your mind before you had 
talked an hour, and believed that if there was an}' 
cheatinof it was on the other side of the house. 

We could hardly be sufficiently grateful for the 
weather which followed us, making every day a new 
benison. At the dinner-station they told us of a hail- 
storm a week ago, which broke every window on one 
side of the train, and at Cheyenne we found that a 
rain-spout yesterday — which is the same storm as 
the "cloud-burst" of Nevada — nearly devastated the 
country. Between and among perils of many kinds 
our large party skim or glide with only the best of 



ON THE WING. 



205 



good fortunes, and day after da\- gives us a new reason 
to ])e thankful. 

One could almost tell when the l)oundarv lines are 
passed by the great change in the outlook in different 
territories. Gray sage-brush in narrow valleys or 
wide plains in Nevada, the moimtains far away and 
dark, with the same dusty look as in New Mexico. l)ut 
sometimes closing suddenly in abrupt palisades, like 
those of the Hudson river, only of more decided 
basaltic formation. In l^tah. tlie ranges drawn to- 
gether in narrow canons of great beauty; in Wyoming, 
the vast extent of high table lands, seven or eight 
thousand feet above sea level, a natural grazing ground 
for numberless cattle. What subtle madness causes 
a stampede among these creatures and forces them 
to cross the track before an advancing train, nobodv 
knows. But the whistle shrills constantly to warn 
them, and then the engine slows to avoid running over 
the stupid creatures, who won't be warned. I am 
disgusted with cows. Their methods are too feminine, 
especially when it comes to crossings. Have not I 
seen the same unaccountable hesitancy, the same spa.s- 
modic jerkiness of approach and retreat, and finally, 
the same wild rush in the very jaws of destruction in 
the civilized streets of my native city? Alas! have 1 
not done it myself? And how hard it is to see one of 
the pet weaknesses of your sex emphasized by a four- 
footed bungler of the same persuasion. The moun- 
tains seem to grow lower as we reach our highest 
grade, and shortly after passing Sherman they dis- 
appear entirely, as the road goes down the opposite 



2o6 ON THE WING. 

slope of the Rockies toward the beautiful grain fields 
of Nebraska. These are like Kansas, without the 
liedges which made such noticeably lovely divisions, 
without, also, the large, comfortable farm-houses which 
have been replaced in all our journeyings since by the 
poor, bare shanties of new settlements. The appear- 
ance of a desperately barren social life which these 
little settlements present is depressing even in the 
midst of the beautiful world surrounding them. There 
was some kind of harmony between their blankness 
and the desert places in which they were set in other 
localities, but here the bleak, harsh look forces itself 
to the front. There is also a noticeable lack of 
wild flowers, after the lavish beauty of the south in 
this respect. 

The situation of Omaha and Council Bluffs, twin 
cities on opposite sides of the Missouri, is delight- 
ful. Broad, green meadows, surpassingly fresh and 
brilliant, stretch up to bold cliffs on one side and tree- 
crowned hills on the other. Nestling in the rich foliage 
which lovingly overshadow them, the pretty, pros- 
perous homes of the young towns put on an attractive- 
ness Western homes too often want. Nothing can 
be more meagre and cheerless than these, as a rule. 
One can easily believe their occupants comfortable, 
but not so easily happy. The aspect of content or 
cheerfulness which flowers and shade add to the house 
they surround is almost entirely absent. It would be 
an insult to the perceptions of the Western people to 
doubt that the fault will be remedied, when means 
of irrigation become more easily available. Here at 



ON THE WING. ZCJ 

Omaha, as indeed largely through the whole of Ne- 
braska, nature has done everything for her children. 
Tlie luxuriant trees could not be more beautiful amid 
the palaces of kings than around these homes of the 
people. The great, muddy, whirling river, which 
divides the cities, with its uprooted snags, and broken 
trees sticking in its shallows, hardly impresses one as 
being capable of such magnificent outbursts of rage, 
as sometimes seize it at earlier and later seasons ; and 
it is with real incredulity we hear of last year's up- 
rising, when it filled a space four miles wide with 
rushing waters. Like Thomas of old, it requires that 
we should be shown the places where the wounds 
were before we beheved ; then we understood, as never 
before, what spring floods must mean to the inhabi- 
tants of river countries. 

Iowa is a relief; still more beautiful than Kansas, 
more undulation, more trees, more exquisite cultiva- 
tion ; frecjuent towns, and between them, for days, 
hardly an inch of unreclaimed land ; the cottages 
improving in the loolv of thrift and industry, and an 
ease of surrounding which speaks of a life less harshly 
devoted to the hard grind of labor. 

Rock Island is another lovely spot, as it rises like 
an emerald set in moonstones from the gray shining 
of the Mississippi, which sweeps grandly by just at 
this point. Illinois does not entirely carry out the 
promise of Iowa in cultivation; the farms toward the 
east, though broad and green, show less evidence of 
care. But clover fields begin to appear, the dear, 
homely red blossoms which we have not seen before 



2o8 ON THE WING. 

this year, except for one tiny patch in Salt Lake 
Valley. How honest and good it looks ! Towns and 
villages come thick and fast now, and here and there 
broad fields, with furrows miles long, stretching away 
like the strings of some enormous harp. The cattle 
stand knee-deep in shining pools, and little rivers 
begin to cross the track. The color of the green 
through this entire state is superb; it is at once deli- 
cate and brilliant to a degree we never knew before. 

'Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, each runs up the gamut 
of delightsomeness, as we speed through it with the 
dear refrain of " Home, home ! " beating time to every 
turn of the wheels bearing us on. The water, which 
lias been so terribly off color, clears itself from even a 
taint of suspicion; the beloved, familiar wild flowers^ 
buttercup and daisy, wild rose and convolvulus, 
chickory and yarrow, creep into fields and hedges. 
We forgive even the ugly Virginia rail-fence where it 
wobbles across lots, and the immense distance be- 
hind us so foreshortens the bit of travel yet to come, 
that when we change cars at Buffalo to run up to 
Niagara Falls for a short time, it seems like an after- 
noon frolic, and that we will be at home for tea. 
After nine thousand miles, who is going to count two 
or three hundred ? Yet I have known the day when a 
trip to New York looked of such magnitude, that it 
took my mind a fortnight to prepare to grasp it, and 
no doubt the same time will come again ; for, as the 
deacon said to Widow Bedott, "we are all sech poor 
critters ! " 



CHAPTER XVII. 

A GLIMPSE AT NIA(iARA. 

IT is always experimental to test a youthful mem- 
ory, by bringing it face to face with the same 
scene twenty years after. The sorcery of time 
is no black art: it softens harsh experiences and 
brightens dull; it throws more light upon sunny spots, 
and deepens obscurity over dark ones, until at last 
thev fade from sight altogether, and only happiness is 
left in bold relief. It was this consciousness that 
threw a chill over the thought of seeing Niagara 
again; Niagara, the one glowing picture of the outer 
world, which had crossed the horizon of a young girl's 
home-life to remain for nearly a score of years its 
highest ideal of beauty and grandeur. It is hard to 
have an old love made light of, even to increase the 
glory of a new; if ihe surpassing wonderments of the 
last two months should overshadow this, and iiiake it 
hereafter take only a second place, how would mv 
steadfast mind ever accustom itself to the change.'* 

This was the dread which exercised me during the 
short ride from Buffalo to Suspension Bridge ; this 
was the dread which floated away with the first glance 
at the rushing river; for is not "a thing of beauty a 
joy forever?" Was there not the old enthusiasm, 
the old delight, waiting to snare us in whirling rapids. 



210 ON THE WING. 

in majestic fall, in the wild commotion of whirlpools 
below ? Was there not the same wonderful green, 
like no other bit of color in the wide world, in the 
curve of the horse-shoe ; the same sublimely direct 
force in the straight plunge of the American side ? 
The little quaking tower was gone from its perilous 
position on the upper edge of the cataract ; but the 
deeply-fretted tumult of waters about the Three Sis- 
ters and the lovely shores of Goat Island, was still 
the same. Surging mountains of spray, rising like a 
soul after resurrection from the abyssmal leap of the 
river; symphonies of sound and color in the deep 
thunder of its roar, the changing emerald of its waters ; 
there they were, all and more than all my fancy painted 
them. Aye, even to make the illusion perfect and 
cause my sober pulses to beat with the fervid rage of 
twenty years syne, was there not the same irrepressible 
hackman, bullying of manner, monstrous of charge, a 
Shylock as of old in searcli of shekels, and ready as 
ever for his pound of flesh? Even the £egis spread 
about us by Raymond's coupons, v/hich had carried 
us victoriously through the battle-fields of monop- 
olists in so many campaigns, was useless here. One 
man bullied us first and abused us afterward ; but I 
am proud to record that we were proof against both, 
and that he did n't make enough out of us to buy salt 
for his porridge — if the wretch ever eats any. 

The policy of building another suspension bridge 
near the falls, at the same great height as the old one, 
and making it wide enough for only one carriage at a' 
time to pass, so that the line desiring to go must wait 



ON THE WING. 211 

for the opposing line to come across, at the expense 
of much time and temper, seemed very strange to us. 
Possibly, like most international policies, it was neces- 
sarily conservaitiv'e, and conservatism is always narrow. 
American enterprise at both ends of the line would 
never have tolerated such halting movement. Ameri- 
can enterprise would have done Avell to curb its vault- 
ing spirit, however, before it builded those warehouses 
and used the falls for water-power, to help its worship 
of the almighty dollar. We could easily have borne 
a little more conservatism there. One can understand 
the action of Ruskin and his followers in petitioning 
Parliament to refuse a charter for railroads throusfh 
the English lake region, when brought face to face 
with the sacrilege here. For there are certain spots 
that, bv reason of reverent association or divine riirht 
of majestic beauty, should be set apart forever from 
the insolence of commonplace association. But there 
will always be a class ready to oppose this feeling 
as sentimental — to put a lager beer saloon in Shaks- 
peare's house, a toll-gate and turnpike on the way to 
Mont Blanc, and a concert hall in the vestibule of 
Saint Peter's, by way of working pecuniary profit 
from the hold these places possess over the imagina- 
tion of susceptible people. 

It is easier to go sight-seeing now at Niagara than 
it used to be. Queer double-barrelled inclined planes, 
which shoot cars up and down from the river bed, 
take the place of the old steep scramble over the pre- 
cipitous walls of the bank. It did not seem quite 
such fun as the other, but it left you with more breath 



212 ON THE WING. 

and less flurry to revel in that glorious fury of waters 
which lashes itself into foam and passion within its 
pent-up channel. There was greater fascination in 
watching this wonderful tangle of malachite, where 
green ran through all the shades from white to black, 
than in looking at the calmer grandeur of the majestic 
falls themselves farther up. There was something 
more in accord with the petulance of human passion 
about one, while the terrible calmness of Divine rage 
sobered the other. We had a matchless day in which 
to see this other wonder of the world — a sky and 
atmosphere that might have been taken from Colorado 
for depth and purity. It appeared to me still that the 
Clifton House, on the Canadian side, had much the 
advantage in situation, and an appearance of retire- 
ment more in harmony with the awful beauty of the 
-scene before it. If one could have a little more time 
for that deliberation and rest, which ought to be part 
of the delight in any such place as this, it would cer- 
tainly be here that one would choose to spend it. The 
world ought not to push too near the gates of any 
such paradise. This is what makes the bustle of the 
little American town distasteful, with its petty traffic, 
its hurry, its busy streets and modern houses. There 
is something sacrilegious in going out of the back 
door and into the byways, as it were, to look at what 
is really the life-spring of the place. On the British 
side you are brought first, and as a matter of course, 
face to face with its chiefest glory. But in the Ameri- 
can quarter it is on the piazza which fronts the village 
street that the guests sit to watch omnibuses from 



ON THE WING. 213 

incoming trains, to ogle village beauties, to note the 
modest business going on in village stores. There is 
nothing to tell that you are within a thousand miles 
of the great cataract, the echo of whose name fills 
the world. One cannot but feel that the isolation 
of the Yosemite ought to be here also, the reverent 
approach which prepares the soul to be in tune with 
its surroundings. Pilgrim schoon and scallop sliell, 
which were signs of old of the true belie\'er on his 
way to the shrine of his devotion, have given way 
now to express trains and fast boats advertised to 
make the through trip in a certain number of hours. 
We must make our pilgrimages in a hurry, or we 
can 't make them at all. I am not sure, however, that 
we do not lose something of more value than even time 
and money in the bustle. To rush as fast as steam 
will carry you into the heart of the stronghold, to 
rattle up to the front door of the International and 
out of the back door, with only the narrow limit of 
Goat Island as a gateway, before you are precipitated 
into the holy of holies, this is not in keeping with 
eternal fitness. I am beginning to think they do 
things better in the West, where you must pay for 
your whistle — and how much paying has to do with 
appreciation ! But it must be that constant motion 
has clouded a usually clear head ; after the agony we 
suffered getting into that Valley of Paradise in Cali- 
fornia, am I actually grumbling at reaching Heaven 
too easily here } And growling over vulgar trafiic and 
village stores, when we bought thereby spar ornaments 



214 ^^^ "^^E WING. 

and Indian bead work, to add to Santa Fe filigree 
and Pueblo pottery in the already over-full trunks ? 
Surely, " Frailty, thy name is woman." 

Sunset on Lake Erie was another picture of glowing 
beauty to hang on the walls of memory ; the ruddy 
glow of the western sky and the path of flame it made 
across the water would have delighted the soul of 
Turner, but no other man would ever have dared 
handle it. A cloud of myriads of gnats or midges, 
which followed us from Suspension Bridge back to 
Buffalo, somewhat obscured its radiance at the time. 
How large a pleasure the sting of an atom of volatile 
mischief such as this can spoil for one ! 

We woke the next morning — the last morning — 
near Albany, in a scene of such exquisite pastoral 
loveliness as one can only get by the Hudson on a 
June morning. The low, rounded hills were covered 
with trees and verdure ; the meadows were fresh 
as an English lawn ; the beautiful bright water of 
the brooks and creeks sparkling and flashing in the 
sunshine, made the memory of the muddy Western 
streams like a bad nightmare. What ease and com- 
fort about the pretty houses ; what home-hke thrift 
about the small farms ; what nestling peace surround- 
ing the church-crowned villages. Ah ! let them say 
what they will about the newer world toward the 
setting sun ! There is more room there, and chance 
for prosperity, more material for brawn and muscle, 
more money-making and hoarding up of riches, broader 
lands and softer climates ; but here, here in New York 



ON THE WING. 215 

and Massachusetts, is the place, after all, for the white 
man to live in. " For is the life not more than food, 
and the body more than raiment." 

What matters the smaller purse, if the happier spirit 
goes with it? And, in all honesty, I must declare, 
that, except for the. very poor, whom life pinches in 
these crowded eastern settlements, life is an easier 
problem here than amid the bare, laborious experi- 
ences of the farther countr}^ Toil is too solely the 
arbiter of destiny there; help of congenial companion- 
ship, little aids to educating the mind and elevating 
the spirit, the thousand nameless and unnoted charms 
which an older civilization spreads so lavishly about 
us, that we only heed when we are deprived of them, 
even the small conveniences which have become so 
much a matter of course with us, that we take them as 
we do the free air of heaven, without recognition or 
gratitude ; all these are things to be dreamed of and 
longed for, but not possessed. 

I fancy that life in those Western wilds must press 
more hardly on the w^oman than the man. It is always 
so where the rudeness of nature still holds the upper 
hand. A man's mind is taken up with many projects; 
he is out in the free air under the beautiful sky; the 
rougher experience which comes to Jiim rouses a 
manly strength of antagonism which is part of every 
honest character; there are novel and exciting hap- 
penings every day; but a woman's horizon is usually 
bounded bv her immediate surroundings, and where 
there is little to enlarge or enliven this, she is aj^t to 



2l6 ON I'HE WING. 

sink into that condition of apathetic dejection which 
marks the bondage of labor ever3'where. The towns 
and cities are of course verv much better off; vet I 
think that if people generally made up their minds 
to hve in the east, as they are obliged to in the west, 
to dwell in simple houses, eat coarse food, forego 
mental training, social advantages, personal comfort, 
amusements and society, there would not be a tithe of 
the difference there is now in the yearly account of 
profit and loss. 

Eve)i luxury in those distant territories cannot at- 
tain the enjoyments, temporal and spiritual, which are 
as much parts of our usual moderate life here as sun- 
light. (That is a bad simile ; there is n't much sunlight 
left in to spoil the carpets of our comfortable New 
England homes ; I should have chosen some other 
universal but despised gift of God.) 

In climate even I am inclined to think we have the 
best of it. For delicate people, in whom great changes 
of temperature produce gradations in healthfulness, 
there can be no question as to the proprietv of going 
where the world swings always between two or three 
degrees, and the equal air keeps the even tenor of its 
way through all seasons. But for persons born with- 
out special ailment, I cannot help feehng that the wide 
range of countries which know both winter and sum- 
mer is healthiest as well as happiest. There are 
virtues of mind and body, notably those of vigor and 
endurance, which seem to require the struggle with 
cold or inclemency to develop. Any one who has 



ON JlIE WING. 2 17 

ever felt the invigorating heartiness of a walk on a 
cold day, and the strength with which l)rain, as well 
as body, works under the fine inspiration of a keen, 
clear atmosphere, knows that tlie more seductive 
sweetness of summer never brings an equal incentive. 
The climate which offers the recurrence of these 
differing experiences ought to be richer far in material 
for nerve, muscle and brain, than that which is con- 
fined within narrower limits. Even home affections 
grow stronger when tliey are nursed by the fireside. 
It would be luifair to judge East and West by the 
same standard to-day : both advantage and disadvan- 
tage are too unequally balanced ; but whenever the 
time comes to make comparison possible, I am ready 
to prophesy that the more changeful seasons will have 
the iiighesi place. 

It was worth jjoinir awav from home if we brought 
back nothing else than this content with the dear old 
spot to which we belonged ; and coming through 
western Massachusetts through that long June day, 
fresh from the delights of the shining world beyond, 
which we had enjoyed so thoroughly, we realized with 
new delight, as the swift miles flew past, that for 
human nature's best development, there was notliing 
wanting in tlie country about us. Back came the 
beloved daisies, foaming in white billows across green 
meadows, and the fragrance of dull, red clover ; back 
the dear rock-ribbed fields, with their mellow toning 
of sorrel in brown and terra-cotta ; back the precise 
i'.ttle markcl-irardens and the thrivino; towns which 



2l8 ON THE WING. 

made them profitable. Even the mills and manufac- 
tories looked as if the corporations who built them 
had some apology for a soul, as the lines of clean, 
little houses crept up under the shelter of the one big 
building, like a brood of chickens under the wing of a 
mother hen. How palatial they looked after the one 
or two-room board-shanty, opening directly from the 
gray desert of the plains ! And the comparative moral 
cleanliness in the lessening quota of saloons and 
drinking-dens, if smaller material number is any indi- 
cation, numerous enough, heaven knows ! yet, but 
not with the infernal preponderance of Western cus- 
tom, where it looked as if every half-dozen men must 
own a private bar-room. I know that many intelligent 
people stoutly deny that there is any greater propor- 
tion of intemperance beyond the Rockies than here 
at home, and so far as cases of actual drunkeness go, 
they may be able to uphold the statement by genuine 
statistics. But that does not change the absolute 
fact of the universality of the custom of drinking. 
A thousand ingenious reasons are offered for this : 
the difficulty of procuring good water, the peculiari- 
ties of climate, the life of greater hardship and 
exposure, the heterogeneous conditions of society, 
and even the large-hearted generosity of a people 
who like to show their friendliness in even such 
small matters as "setting up drinks for the crowd.'* 
No doubt all these have weight, yet none of them 
make good excuse for an improper and dangerous 
custom. 



ON THE WTNG. 219 

And now, as the afternoon sun drops lower, what 
fair city is this that rises in the east, throned like a 
queen above the silver Charles, man3-towered and 
pinnacled, with clustering roof and taper spire ? How 
proud she looks, yet modest, as one too sure of her 
innate nobility to need adventitious aid to impress 
others. Look at the aesthetic simplicity of her pose 
on the single hill, which is all the mistaken kindness 
of her children has left of the three mountains which 
were her birthright. Behold the stately avenues that 
stretch by bridge and road, radiating her lavish favors 
in every direction ; look at the spreading suburbs that 
crowd beyond her gates, more beautiful than the parks 
and pleasure-grounds of her less favored sisters. See 
where she sits, small but precious, her pretty feet in 
the blue waters that love to dally about them ; her 
pretty head, in its brave gilt cap, as near the clouds 
as she can manage to get it ; her arms full of what- 
ever is rarest and dearest and best. For does n't 
she hold the " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table " and 
Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall and Harvard College ? 
Do not the fiery eloquence of Phillips, the songs of 
Longfellow, the philosophy of Fisk, the glory of the 
Great Organ, and the native lair of culture, belong 
with her ? Ah ! why should w^e not " tell truth and 
shame the devil" — doesn't she bring to us the babies 
and the family doctor ? 

To the portion of the pleasant company who have 
made the long journey together — for some still hold 
their heads to other stars and some yet linger by the 



220 ON THE WING. 

way — I would rather say an revoir than adieu, wish- 
ing to each of them, meantime, "gluck auf," in the 
formula of another good-natured wanderer, "Here's 
to your good health and your families ! May you live 
long and prosper." I reserve for another chapter what 
I desire to say on the general subject of excursions. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

PROS AND CONS ON THE SUBJECT OF EXCURSIONS, 

IT is a significant though much neglected fact, that 
both the Greeks and Romans made their spirit 
of wisdom a goddess. Astute as they were, 
they understood thoroughly that no masculine divinity 
could have possessed the staying power of holding 
back trom conclusions before all his premises were 
before him. Only a woman could have the clear 
eyes to see the truth where it was hidden, and the 
clear head to retard her judgment until she had un- 
earthed the whole of it. If tliis theory disagrees with 
later opinion on the subject, it would not surprise me; 
men have had too much to do with the world of late 
years to get a fair show for woman without a fight for 
it. But I would simply like to point them to the truth 
that it was Pallas Athena who sprang from the brain 
of Jove, a full-statured, well-armored, solid, intellectual 
fact, and the Greeks knew wliat they w^ere about when 
they worshipped her. This is why, out of loyalty to 
my sex and an idea, I have waited to the end before 
hazarding any incomplete conclusions ; a rash, mis- 
guided man, spoiled by a long course of political bias 
for ever being able to look judicially at anything, 
would have swamped you with contradictory opinions 
a dozen times in the record of these three months. 



222 ON THE WING. 

I confess to having had a strong bias against excur- 
sions in the outset. The disadvantages of such modes 
of travelHng are apparent on the outside. There is 
the planning of a trip by some person or persons 
unknown, whereby your time is absolutely disposed of, 
and no chance allowed for exercising your own predi- 
lections as to hurry or loitering. You are wound up, 
so to speak, at the start, to go for a certain number of 
days or weeks or months ; you know beforehand where 
you will turn up at a certain hour, just as well as you 
know the ultimate end of the letter you put in the 
post-office. Besides, you are one of a crowd ; you are 
not an individual, endowed, as the catechism hath it, 
''with understanding and free wih," but an atom, to 
be pushed or hindered in common with the mass to 
which you belong. This to a sensitive nature, counts 
for a great deal ; for though personality is in a measure 
lost, there is a publicity given to all one's movements, 
which has the effect of making one feel notorious, and 
notoriety even of a pleasant kind is distasteful to 
many. You feel labeled and ticketed like your trunk 
and shawl; or you feel as if you were going to feel 
so, which amounts to the same thing so far as you are 
concerned. 

But here the drawbacks end ; and the advantages, 
which overbalance them a hundred fold, but which, 
being weightier, do not rise so easily to the surface, 
begin to claim recognition. By becoming one of 
a Raymond excursion party — for I will speak only 
of what I know — you are enabled to start on your 
pleasure jaunt with the first grand requisite for true 



ON THE WING. 



223 



enjoyment: a mind absolutely free from care about 
your destination or your belongings. Your special 
section of your special car is always ready for you ; 
no matter how roads change or trains are made up ; 
you hold the same relative position to the end, and 
see the same friendly faces near. This gives a home 
feeling that no haphazard arrangement of neighbors 
could offer, and makes itself felt as a real boon before 
the devious journey is well begun. You have no 
thought of the morrow ; wiser heads than yours are 
arranging your rooms at the next stopping-place, see- 
ing to the transfer of your luggage, planning your 
rides and drives with congenial company, so that when 
you enter the carriage and drive to your hotel you find 
your own trunk in your own apartment, as if it had 
grown there. Any one who has ever experienced the 
delays and annoyances of even an ordinary journey in 
a new direction, by reason of hackmen and checks, 
hotel porters and clerks, will appreciate what this 
means. The long route of travel is subdivided into a 
succession of sliort trips, with a few days or nights' 
rest between each ; in every new city, prominent points 
of interest are grouped together and brought to your 
notice ; whatever is worth seeing is thrown open to 
you without any of the usual formalities of introduc- 
tion ; you are lodged always at the best houses ; and, 
although it is impossible for every one in so large a 
number to have the very best room on the very best 
floor of each house, you will find your accommodation 
quite as good as the average. It is often very much 
above this ; for, whereas, when alone, some sudden 



224 ^^^ ^'^^ WING. 

influx of tl■a^•el may so hll your chosen hotel as to leave 
for you onl) a closet or a cot-bed, as one of a party, 
arranged for beforehand, you are always sure of com- 
fortable quarters. At meal-stations, in out-of-the-way 
places, especial!}- tiirough tlie newer settlements, you 
are invariably better cared for than the ordinary trav- 
eller; for the keeper of a restaurant, certain of a posi- 
tive large number, makes generous preparation, where, 
for the insecure patronage of usual trains, he could not 
run the risk. You travel almost entirely by special 
train, which gives more time for refreshment, and does 
away with many petty trials, both of delay and hurr}-. 
A lady is enabled to visit places usually out of a 
woman's reach, and with no need of personal escort, 
since the management takes unusual care of all those 
who have no especial protector. Taken as a whole, 
your travelling companions are of a far more select 
class than would fall to your lot in every-day journey- 
ing. To prove this, you have only to walk through the 
cars of any regular train, which may from time to time 
come in connection with }'Oin- own. Little courtesies, 
in the shape of special time-tables, cards or pamphlets 
of information regarding new routes, the personal at- 
tendance from point to point of superintendents of 
new roads, and scores of other helpful and reassuring 
attentions, keep one at ease through, the long journey. 
And you are uo^ obliged to be on terms of absolute 
intimacy wnth every one wdiose name you find on 
your pretty souvenir programme. People will choose 
their own particular friends, and will take you or leave 
you, just as they see fit, and you will exercise a similar 



ON THE WING. 225 

right. There will be the pleasant, good feehng of a 
community assimilated by the same desires and same 
ends, but that is all. You know in the outset the 
exact amount of expense to be incurred, and can leave 
what margin for other spending you choose; and, 
unless you are one of the few dowered with plenty of 
money, and the still fewer rich in plenty of time, with 
a good head for planning, and a magnificent genius in 
the way of executive ability, there is no way on earth 
by which you can make a pleasure trip so happily. 

You will find always, without any doubt, a few pro- 
fessional grumblers, "people who would find fault 
with heaven because their halo did not fit," as our 
picturesque young man once put it, who will try to 
torture you, while they make themselves happy by 
growling out odious comparisons and sowing spiteful 
innuendoes. They will try to make you believe that 
the excursionists are sent to third-class hotels for 
third-rate accommodations ; that they are snubbed by 
porters and sneered at by waiters ; that they travel 
under a cloud, and, as it were, on sufferance. But 
use your own eyes and ears; exercise your own intel- 
ligence, and prove whether this is so. It is an unfor- 
tunate fact in natural history that the manners of the 
animal man become still more animal in certain situa- 
tions, and that Western hotel and car service form 
part of these. But you suffer no more than your, 
neighbor, the regular traveller. There was a Pullman 
porter on the return trip who used to fling inoffending 
pillows about with a fine scorn, intended to show that 
he was meant for better things than making up berths 

IS 



226 ON THE WING. 

in sleeping-cars, but his reign of terror poured alike 
over the just and the unjust. For the rest, here in an 
excursion, as well as in every other situation of life, 
you will find yourself treated very much as you 
deserve. If you are selfish, imperious and domineer- 
ing, rude to your fellow-servant, and inflated with the 
importance of the sordid, little-souled Ego, who can 
stoop to be ungenerous or impolite to an inferior, 
then you will be thoroughly hated and genuinely 
snubbed, and take my compliments with it; but if you 
keep a civil tongue in your head and a kindly thought 
in your heart for those who are ministering to your 
pleasure or convenience ; if you mingle a little human- 
ity with your every-day manners, and have a remnant, 
at least, of that true dignity which is above being 
wounded by every pin-prick, you will go on healthily 
and happily, and find the world what you make it. A 
Raymond excursionist has no coupon which absolves 
him from the ordinary courtesies of life. 

As concerns the means of travel, they are the best 
we are capable of yet, though I am surprised to find 
the best so bad. In all the years that have elapsed 
since the invention of palace and sleeping-cars, it is 
discouraging to think so few improvements have been 
made in them. There is the same atrocious ventila- 
tion, especially at night, when it is Hobson's choice 
whether you will suffocate for want of air, or be 
smothered by coal dust. There are the same infernal 
curtains, hot, heavy and dusty, sealing the sarcophagus 
of a berth hermetically, whereas the lightest and thin- 
nest muslin drapery would answer all purposes of 



ON THE WING. 227 

concealment and give one a chance-breath for life 
besides. Stupidity cannot go further than in the con- 
tinuance of these dreadful woolen draperies, in place 
of a light, penetrable screening of wire gauze, or some- 
thing equally clean and porous. To say they are 
necessary evils, is absurd on the face of it; if Yankee 
ingenuity cannot meet the question of draughts by 
any other means than choking the individual to put 
him out of danger of catching cold, it is certainly 
wanting in its old-time gumption. There is the same 
incomplete toilet arrangement, so wofully inadequate 
to the number of aspirants for cleanliness ; and the 
same unkind distinction between masculine and femi- 
nine races, by which the men have twice as much 
accommodation as the women. This, I am told, is 
because twice or three times the number of men travel 
as of w^omen ; but, in that case, could not some 
divison be made by which women alone, or with 
escorts, could have one car on each train, and have in 
that car at least equal rights with their husbands or 
brothers ? There would always be more trouble in 
the lady's car; for the very fact of tlicir being less 
used to journeying makes them less able to be me- 
thodical, and more apt, I am sorry to say, to be incon- 
siderate to each other. I have seen one inoffensive 
looking little woman stay thirty minutes bathing, and 
arranging her hair and dress, while eleven others 
waited their turn, and the breakfast-station was less 
than an hour off. But such incomprehensible stupidity 
does not alter the fact that we ought to have at least 
equal washing facilities. What is a man's toilet while 



228 ON THE WING. 

travelling, whether or no, but a splutter and splash, a 
scrub with a towel, and a momentary tussle with a 
hair-brush ; a tug at a shoulder-brace and a jerk at a 
collar, a twitch at a neck-tie and wrestle with a sleeve- 
button, a slap at a vest and dash at a coat, — and there 
he is, looking as if he stepped out of a band-box. 
Ikit a woman ! think of the back-hair and front-hair, 
tlie frizzes and bangs, the underskirts and overskirts 
and draperies, the mysteries of the nail toilet, the 
artful artlessnesses of neck trimmings, the many- 
buttoned boots, the crinoline and pull-backs : think of 
the slow and laborious progress toward final perfec- 
tion, of her dainty deftness and exquisite nicet}-, and 
think of it all in a closet three feet square in a train 
going thirty miles an hour, with a dozen anxious and 
aimless ones waiting outside and making audible 
comments on her slowness ! O, it is easy to see that 
the sleeping-car is a masculine invention ! In order 
of excellence, the Pullman comes easily first; it is 
roomier, brighter aiid fresher; its pillows are larger, 
and there is some resting-place for the poor, tired 
porter. The Silver palace cars come next ; they are 
nearl}' as good as the Pullman ; the Wagner comes last 
of all, and a long way behind. People who do not 
travel farther than Chicago have the very poorest ap- 
pointments ; the Wagner has a monopoly of the East. 
As the requisites for a California journey, the less 
one burdens one's self with the better. There are 
certain essentials and a few ameliorations which it 
would be well to keep in mind. One wants at almost 
any season of the year a strong, plain, comfortable 



ON THE WING. 229 

travelling-dress, short and easy, of some close-grained 
woolen material, as absolutel)- free from trimming as 
is consistent with good taste. Trimmings mean dust, 
and dust soon means dirt and frowsiness. Gray, with 
some decided Lit of color about the collar and sleeves, 
is best, for gray alone is unbecoming to most people ; 
peacock-blue is both serviceable and pretty; light 
browns are admissible, but dark colors, almost with- 
out exception, show the wear and tear of travel sooner 
than others. If a second travelling-dress could be 
taken to provide against emergencies, it would be 
always well ; better, if it is thinner than the first, so 
that oppressively hot weather_ might find it available. 
An ulster is the most convenient outer wrap, for it 
protects the dress and leaves the arms free, and a 
gossamer waterproof can be kept in one of its pockets. 
The underclothes should be all of gra}', light both in 
shade and texture ; nothing is so wearing as a heavy 
weight of clothing borne on hips and shoulders, in 
addition to other fatigue; This much of change, with 
a pair of easy boots, or slippers for the cars, should 
be kept among the hand-luggage in a stout strap. The 
toilet arrangements, with a light woolen wrapper or 
sacque, for night wear, can go in a satchel. The 
trunk can be packed to suit one's self, always remem- 
bering that there is no need of an overplus of 
changes, as soiled clothes can be laundried at every 
city where there is a two-days' rest : and one best 
dress, or two at most, makes ample allowance for a 
three-months' stay. One wants a dress-hat and mantle 
for state occasions ; any kind of simple, becoming 



236 ON THE WING. 

head-gear for travelling ; a long tissue veil of silk and 
wool, which will probably be worn, to the exclusion of 
everything else about head and neck, in the cars, as 
a protection from dust and ashes, through most of 
the journey; a pair of stout boots for rough or stormy 
walking, and as many pairs of long-wristed gloves as 
your pvirse will allow. There is nothing like a rail- 
road trip for using up gloves. By the way, I must 
not forget the purse itself, and y^?^ must not forget to 
put money in it. There are a thousand and one little 
calls not down on the bills, and not absolutely neces- 
sary, but which are sure to come, nevertheless. 

A man's needs I cannot speak about so decidedly; 
whatever sort of trousers will bear wear and tear and 
look none the worse for it; whatever kind of coat and 
vest will remain always respectable in the face of insult 
and injury; whatever manner of suit, in short, will 
admit of being grimed by soot and ashes, wet by rain, 
crumpled by sitting up or lying down, and played the 
mischief with generally, yet always be neat and tidy; 
that is the kind of stuff they need, whether they buy it 
at Oak Hall or Randidge's. But I know they want 
colored shirts, lightly tinted, either wool or cambric, 
and some loose sailor ties, and as many boots as their 
female cousins, and two or three hats to be blown 
away over the plains or in San Francisco harbor. 
That is the favorite amusement. The Big Boy says 
they need also a suit of Pjammas, whatever that 
dreadful sounding article may be. 

They need beside, both men and women, plenty of 
good humor and a fair share of health, a quiet con- 



ON THE WING. 231 

science and a little leaven of consideration. Having 
which graces, which God has graciously placed within 
reach of every human, I can wish them no better gift 
to set them off, than a Russia-leather bound book 
of coupons for a Raymond excursion to Colorado and 
California. 



INDEX 



Page. 

Alkali Plains i8S 

An Adobe House 7^ 

Apache Canon 65 

A Ride in the Engine -19 

Arizona Desert ^2 

A Woman's Judgment 221 

Bathing in Salt Lake 196 

Big Trees — Mariposa Grove 129 

Boston 219 

Burros, The 43 

Cable-roads and "Dummies" i55 

Cactus, The 24 

California Desert 84 

Cattle on Plains 205 

Chicago ^ 

Chinese Laborers . . . . ■ . • ■ • -174 

Chinese Quarter iS' 

Chinese Question iS9 

Chinese Tea-house 152 

Chinese Theatre iS3 

Circular, Western Hotel 201 

Clark's J05 

Clear Creek Canon 4° 

Coarse Gold Gulch 103 

Colorado ............ 23 

Colorado Springs 4i 

Comparison between East and West ...... 215 

Contrasts in Scenery • 205 

Council Bluffs 206 

Cow-catcher, Riding on the 55 

Currency '^^ 

Denver .........••• 3° 

Deserted Mining Camps . . . . • . • • '7° 

Dining-Car ^7 



234 INDEX. 

Disadvantages of Excursions 

Echo Canon ..... 

El Paso 

Emigrant Wagons .... 
Excursions, Advantages of . 
First Experience in a Sleeper . 

Foot-Hills 

Fort Yuma 

Fruit in California .... 

Garden of the Gods .... 

Glacier Point ...... 

Grand Canon of the Arkansas 

Grass Valley 

Green River ..... 
Habits of Drinking .... 
Hotel del Monte .... 
Hj'draulic Mining ..... 
Inspiration Point .... 

Iowa 

Irrigation in California 

Kansas ....... 

Kansas City ..... 

Las Vegas ...... 

Los Angeles ..... 

Manitou 

Marshall's Pass .... 

Mexican Dance . 

Mining Interests .... 

Missouri ....... 

Monterey ...... 

Montezuma, The ..... 

Motto in a Dining-ruoni 

Mormons, The ..... 

Nebraska ...... 

Niagara 

Ohio 

Omaha 

Orange Groves ..... 

Outfit for California trip 

Placer 



Page. 



INDEX. 



235 



Pretty Maid of Antonito 

Pueblo 

Pueblo Indians .... 
Pullman Cars .... 
Quartz Mining .... 

Raton 

Rock Island ..... 

Royal Gorge 

Sacrame'nto ..... 

Salt Lake City 

Santa Fe 

Santa Monica 

Scout, Indian .... 

Sheep and Shepherds 
Sierra Madre Villa 

Sleeping Cars 

Smartsville 

Snow-sheds 

Society in San Francisco 
Southern California . . . . 
Speculation, The fever of 
Tabernacle at Salt Lake, The 
Toilet Accommodations in Sleepers 

Toltec Gorge 

Trinidad 

United States Soldiers 

Veta Pass . . . . 

Vineyards in April . . . , 

Western Massachusetts . 

Western Sheriff, A . 

Wheat Valleys near Sacramento . 

Why Wisdom ^vas a Goddess . 

Wyoming Grazing Plains 

Yosemite, Stage-Ride into the 

Yosemite, Valley of the 



Page. 

57 

• 27 
7' 

i3-»7 

180 

. 6r 

207 

• 51 
164 

. 187 

65 

• 95 
203 

. 62 

87 
. 226 

177 
. 202 

149 

• 85 

157 

. 192 

227 

• 55 
59 
30 
54 

5 

217 

. 81 

172 

. 221 
200 
100 
III 



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'pHE "DEL MONTE" is handsomely furnished throughout, and 
-^ has all the modern improvements of hot and cold water, gas, etc. 
It is picturesquely situated in a grove of 126 acres of oak, pine, spruce 
and cypress trees, and is within a quarter of a mile of the beach, which 
is unrivalled for bathing purposes. 



PARKS AND DRIVES. 

SEVEN THOUSAND ACRES OF LAND have also been re- 
served, especially as an adjunct to the " Hotel del Monte," and 
through which have been constructed twenty-five miles of splendid 
macadamized roadway, skirting the ocean shore and passing through 
extensive forests of s[)ruce, pine and cypress trees. 

BEAUTIFUL DRIVES to Cypress Point, Carmel Mission, Point 
Lobos, Pacific Grove Retreat, and other places of great interest. 



SEA BATHINO. 

THE BATHING FACILITIES at this place are unsurpassed, 
having a magnificent beach of pure white sand for surf bathing. 



WARM AND SWIMMING BATHS. 

THE BATH HOUSE contains spacious swimming tanks (150 
X 50 feet) for warm salt water plunge and swimming baths, with elegant 
rooms connecting for Individual Baths, with douche and shower facilities. 



TERMS FOR BOARD. 

By the Day, $3.00. By the Week, $17.50. 

Parlors from $i.oo to $2.50 per day extra. 

Children, $10.50 per week (provided they eat in children's dining- 
room ; otherwise, full rates). 

SPECIAL accommodations FOR BKIDAL PARTIES. 

GEO. SCHONEIVALD, Manager, 






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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



111 




016 092 985 6?.' 



